TechMediaTalk

Who’s Watching Online Video? Part 2

Posted on | January 31, 2009

In Part 1 of Who’s Watching Online Video, I discuss some mis-perceptions I have come across of companies and folks in the industry about who they are serving as audeinces.   We all know who your audience is matters, no matter the business you’re in.  Let’s bring the discussion home:  Why does it matter who your audience is for online video?

Advertising:

Clearly, advertising is one reason that comes to mind.  Traditional advertising is still heavily based on demographic targeting.  Giving short shrift to such demographic data is imposing artificial limits your potential for advertising revenue, especially when such information is or can be easily available.  While some may argue that online targeting can be done more contextually based on what someone is watching and their online behavior, such targeting and personalization technologies are at a very nascent stage; the criteria are still broad, particularly with brand advertising (including video advertising).  Regardless, demographic data is complementary and still useful in packaging your service directly or indirectly to advertisers.

According to Erwin Ephron here, godfather of modern media planning:

…And that’s precisely the problem. So far, with the exception of search, online advertising has failed to find its core purpose. And to characterize the rest of online advertising as a single entity wrongly diminishes the challenge, because there are many online ad formats. 

The solution? Erwin underscored that we’re still lacking fundamental ethnographic research about how people interact with and use online advertising. The problem is that basic. We need to better understand it before we can even begin to think about measuring and connecting it to business performance goals.

Product Requirements:

The second perhaps more important reason from my vantage of those for whom I write is that product design and strategy cannot be disconnected from usability and therefore, from users.  The barriers to technology availability and adoption are so low that it is getting progressively easier to roll out new features and layer new functionality with relative ease.  While overall this is a good thing, great products and services strike a very delicate balance between being user driven and engineering driven.  

Great products bear the hallmark of simplicity.  Whether this is the iPod, Google search or something else, what sets such products apart from the crowd is the relative simplicity and well defined usability considerations.  

While online video is a draw for users across diverse demographic segments, simplicity, ease of use, elegance, and other product design criteria are however very subjective across different demographics.  While teens and younger users are heavily vested in their social networks, sharing of new media, and such, older users and seniors are more likely to consume online video with more similarity to television viewing than not.  Their needs are likely based more on search, information and/or entertainment viewing than socializing and sharing.  Simpler search and navigation may be more appealing to them than interactivity.

Parallels from the world of Video Gaming?

Take the case of video gaming.  While the attention is given to massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), and game consoles, the fastest growing segment of video gaming is in fact online casual games.  The demographic driving this is women over forty.  It also happens that one of the fastest growing segments of Internet users is seniors and has been for some time.  

While a great deal of innovation is going on in the use cases and experiences around video, and by no means am I suggesting that this is not required, creating new compelling user experiences may have more to do with knowing who the audience is for meeting your growth targets than rolling out the latest gee-whiz technology.  

Perhaps another apt example from the world of gaming is of the latest generation of game consoles:  Nintendo Wii is outselling both Playstation3 and Xbox 360 combined.  While it is built on an earlier generation processor than its competitors and does not have the same quality of graphics or processing speed, it changed the paradigm for what game consoles are.  In the process it has broadened the game console market beyond the traditional 18-34 year gamers - who (by definition) are the ‘YouTube’ generation.

What do you think?  Start a discussion below.

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Category: Consumers, Market Data

Comments

4 Responses to “Who’s Watching Online Video? Part 2”

  1. Who’s watching Online Video? Part 1 : TechMediaTalk
    February 12th, 2009 @ 9:10 am

    [...] I’ll discuss the implications of this for us in the industry in a subsequent post. [...]

  2. Brand Advertising on the Internet – Is Old New Again? : TechMediaTalk
    February 12th, 2009 @ 9:21 am

    [...] a previous post here, I wrote about the importance of knowing who your audience is for online video inordertooptimize [...]

  3. Update on ‘Whose Watching Online Video?’ : TechMediaTalk
    February 17th, 2009 @ 7:32 am

    [...] Part 1 and Part 2 of ‘Whose Watching Online Video’ I emphasized the importance of knowing your audience and why [...]

  4. Mobile Video still a Ways to Go; Who’s Watching Online Video Revisited : TechMediaTalk
    March 25th, 2009 @ 8:16 am

    [...] viewer demographics) is also mirrored for mobile media.  The conclusions drawn in my earlier post (Who’s Watching Online Video - Part II) would seem applicable to mobile media.  To restate it, while the penetration among baby boomers is [...]

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