Young men are the most frequent online video viewers, but US Internet users of all ages are getting into the act.
That is the main finding of BurstMedia's "Online Insights" report, conducted in December 2007.
BurstMedia found that more than seven out of 10 adult US Internet users surveyed had viewed
online video content. A majority of all age
segments had watched online videos, including more than half of respondents age 65 and older.
Young men were viewing most often. More than a third of the 18- to-24-year-old male online video viewers in the survey reported that they watched once a day or more.
The good news for advertisers is that more than half of online
video viewers recalled seeing in-stream advertisements in content they had
watched.
But more than three-quarters
of respondents said in-stream advertisements in online video were
intrusive, and about one-half said advertisements in video content
disrupted their Web surfing experience. Women were more likely than men
to say advertisements in video content disrupted their surfing.
One-half of respondents
stopped watching an online video once they encountered an in-stream
advertisement.
More than two-thirds of respondents said they paid about
the same or less attention to in-stream video advertisements than to standard creative units on the same page.
"Marketers need to tread carefully
with online video advertising," said Jarvis
Coffin, CEO of BurstMedia. "It’s pretty clear from our research that
most online video consumers are not yet willing to sit through
advertising to get the content they seek."
The online video viewer demographic characteristics reported by BurstMedia differed somewhat from Internet users who visited video and movie Websites.
Nielsen Online's "NetView" report, cited by the Center for Media Research, found a nearly even split by gender among the site visitors surveyed.
These are apples-to-oranges comparisons, since Burst was asking about frequency of viewings among online video viewers and Nielsen profiled unique Internet users visiting video sites.
Yet the Nielsen study indicated that 18- to-24-year-olds comprised a small portion of visitors to such sites. What can be said is that, as a result of their frequent online video viewing, 18-to-24-year-olds represent an outsized percentage of all video views compared with their numbers in the population as a whole.
The eMarketer Online Video Content report will be published in February 2008. Click here to be notified when it is released.