Streaming Media - August/September 2007 - (Page 65)

Can Newspapers Compete With TV? Well, newspapers can certainly compete with television, as shown by a surprising survey recently conducted by Borrell Associates. The survey found that newspaper sites with videos are doing a better job of attracting advertising dollars than are television stations that have put video on their websites. The Borrell study reported that in 2006 newspapers sold $81 million in local online video commercials, while TV broadcasters sold only $32 million worth of locally targeted online video ads. The survey also pegged the 2006 market at $161 million, and projected that to grow by 5% to $371 million by the end of 2007, and predicted the market to hit $5 billion within 5 years. You’d think television stations would be at a distinct advantage here, given their huge archives of video inventory. But Glaser and other media watchers suspect that many TV stations may be just dumping onto their sites redundant footage that TV viewers have already seen. In contrast, the videos that newspapers are producing are totally new, and sometimes they complement a print story the viewer has already shown interest in, so he or she is already inclined to want to watch it. It will be interesting to see whether local TV stations will wise up and catch up with their newspaper competitors. According to the Borrell study, from last year until this year, the number of broadcasters expecting to sell streaming video ads has risen from 72% of survey respondents to 80%, so it looks like they’re not completely asleep at the wheel. With the help of Brightcove, The Boston Globe website’s high school sports section features usergenerated video. have been busy adding video just to have something to sell against.” Glaser says that video ads are popular with advertisers “because it’s easy to ignore a banner ad, but a video ad is more in your face. Plus, the medium of video is just a much better way to deliver an ad. It provides more branding. TV ads, because they deliver sound and vision, have always been the gold standard for advertisers and marketers. So online video ads have a potential for great return. And that’s why everyone is so high on these video ads.” And online video ads promise to get even more popular as time goes on. “All the research firms are predicting that video advertising will go from the pretty small portion that it is today to bigger and bigger year after year as more people watch more online videos,” says Glaser. Now, newspapers may not necessarily be the big winners here, Glaser cautions. It may instead be places like Google or YouTube or MySpace that end up collecting the lion’s share of video advertising dollars. That will depend a lot on how serious newspapers become about aggressively pursuing online ad dollars, distribution deals, and so forth. But a good sign for newspapers is a recent survey done by the Online Publishers Association (www.online-publishers.org), which showed that more people watch online news video than watch those wacky off-the-wall videos that user-generated content sites like YouTube have been so successful with. Newspapers with multimedia-rich websites will also profit from the general trend away from old media toward the new, according to Glaser. “Advertisers are looking at media usage numbers, comparing time spent online versus time spent with old media, and they are realizing that it doesn’t make sense to spend all their budgets on old media,” says Glaser. “So it’s slowly shifting over to new media. In fact, in the U.K. there are now more online ads being sold than radio ads.” Full Speed Ahead Colin Mulvany of The Spokesman-Review says that the ongoing trend for newspapers to go fishing for bigger audiences with multimedia as the bait is creating drastic changes for most of his colleagues in print journalism. “We have to approach it with no fear,” he says. “If newspaper journalists want to go anywhere in this business, they’d better know how to do slideshows and video, because that’s where it’s going,” says Mulvany. “Our paper has become web-centric. And we’ve all got to get over the concept that there are two separate entities. The website is the newspaper, just in a different form. “Management at newspapers doesn’t realize that there’s this huge revolution going on, and it’s happening under its feet. And the papers that have made this transition to multimedia and are moving forward are the ones who are going to benefit.” Next issue: What newspapers are doing to compete in the online video marketplace, from staffing to monetization. Mark Fritz (markfritz@intergrafix.net) is a freelance author and contributing editor to StreamingMedia.com. Comments? Email us as letters@streamingmedia.com, or check the masthead for other ways to contact us. WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM 65 http://www.online-publishers.org http://StreamingMedia.com http://WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Streaming Media - August/September 2007

Table of Contents Sweet Sixteen Letters to the Editor Technology and Business Trends IBM Takes Webcasting to the Desktop ROI in the EDU Bank Serves Espresso, Enterprise Video Online Video Advertising: Hit or Miss MLB’s Foul Bawl A Crash Course in Flash Video Newspapers in Multimedia Metamorphosis Webcasting Large Entertainment Events: Seeing Through the Hype Webcasting With Windows Media Can’t Start A Fire . . . A WiMAX Primer Mobile Video at Last Telestream Episode Pro Grass Valley ProCoder 3 Silverlight Is No Flash Killer

Streaming Media - August/September 2007

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