You're going to have to excuse the language on this one, but I am talking about the hilarious video music featuring Sarah Silverman and Matt Damon singing 'I'm fuckin' Matt Damon' which has been watched by 8m people.If you don't know the story, here's the shortish version, which began with Silverman's boyfriend the US chat show host Jimmy Kimmel.Kimmel used to joke on his ABC show at the end "Apologies to Matt Damon, but we ran out of time," even though the actor was never scheduled to appear. Eventually in September 2006 when Damon finally appeared as a guest, and you guessed, only to have his slot cut short at the end the show and the actor staging a mock tantrum and storming off the set.Silverman then made a video earlier this month 'I'm fuckin' Matt Damon', which became a massive hit on ABC.com and YouTube.
Kimmel fired back with a video of his own starring Damon's friend Ben Affleck called 'I'm fucking Ben Affleck'. This has also been watched by millions. Granted they have stars in them, but (and really this was where I was going anyway before I got sidetracked by the Silverman video) they present a huge and growing problem for TV networks. Google has know this for ages, but has not done a great deal about it. Now that is changing and it is starting to work on its strategy to maximise online video advertising because of the huge potential.That revenue does not simply, as we all know, centre around celebrities although that is clearly bankable. Just look at those videos and the numbers they have pulled in.It is about videos being created by all of us. For instance, we covered a story last week that put a global value on videoclip websites of $31bn.A 216-second clip alone of a Canadian girl dancing with a hula-hoop on another site clipstar.com is estimated to be costing the worldwide TV and traditional media markets $222,480, according to a report by MediaTel. This breaks down to $1,030 a second, a figure unheard of a decade ago.It is estimated that spending on online advertising is growing between 30% to 60% according to research and by next year it is predicted to outstrip television advertising spend in the UK by up to £3.5bn, with the rest of the world not far behind.This is a serious problem for TV, already under assault from ad skipping, and online videos are eating further and further into that. Advertisers want to be where their ads are being watched, and advertising around such killer content can produce great results and give the kind of traffic that advertisers can simply not win elsewhere. In December alone, the amount of time spent watching video online grew 34% last year.Now Google, which despite dominating the space, has yet to really make money out of online video, plans to sell ads on videos that appear outside of YouTube and it also plans clickable video ads on the side of its own search results pages. What has already happened to newspapers, which have been deserted by classified advertising and the US newspaper industry has been hit with thousands losing their jobs, could start to happen to TV. It might not happen slowly, but if firms like Google and others can get it right my guess is that it will speed up very quickly. From 0 to Craig's List in no time flat.
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Gordon Macmillan
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