Kelsey Research Confirms User Interest in Video

The Kelsey Group put out a press release today, promoting a report on video and small business advertising, that includes consumer research showing:

59 percent of those surveyed claimed to watch online video, and more than half said they engage in some sort of response activity, such as visiting a Web site, going to a physical location or making a purchase.

This confirms other research in the market regarding the popularity and effectiveness of online video as a content and/or ad category:

• Online Publishers Association (.pdf, 3/06)
• comScore (5/06)
• eMarketer (4/07, compiling third-party data)

And there are other studies showing similar results: video is both extremely popular and an extremely viral medium. One interesting question/issue not released in the Kelsey Group PR material (but probably in the data) concerns demographic segmentation. Those data are in the comScore and OPA findings above. In other words, for certain audiences, online video is going to be a much more effective (albeit more challenging) medium than TV for branded messaging.

The other questions the report seems to address, drawing inferences, are the growing importance of video for online publishers and the emerging video production infrastructure. I wrote about that here:

[Online publishers] will sooner or later have to confront the issue of video and make a conscious choice to add or eschew it. If the decision is in favor of adoption, the question becomes how to get it. (Here’s my related post from early this year Local Video: Who Will Shoot It?) And quality matters (notwithstanding the early popularity of poor quality videos on YouTube).

The second question (“who will shoot it”) is addressed to some degree in the appropriately named post above, “Local Video: Who Will Shoot It?”

For publishers TurnHere is the leading and logical choice. SpotRunner, which has been addressing the spot cable market, will be in online video before long and there are lots of others with video and/or flash, video-like capabilities including EZShow and AdMission. There are other companies too that I haven’t mentioned, like Spotzer. And simplified SEM services may also begin to offer video ad production and distribution as part of their packages.

In six months or less almost every online publisher addressing the SMB market will have some “solution” for online video advertising and/or content. As I’ve said to some people before, online video is the new full page yellow pages ad (though nowhere near as expensive). 🙂

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