online video viewing doubles
I’ve been saying for a while that online video is the Next Big Thing in social media. Recent research seems to bear this out. A study released on Friday by ABI Research shows that online video viewers – in the US at least – have doubled over the last year:
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The number of Americans watching video on their computers has doubled over the past year and growing numbers of younger viewers are enjoying movies and TV shows online, according to a study released Friday by ABI Research.
The study found that the number of American consumers watching video streamed through a browser had soared over the past year, from 32 percent a year ago to 63 percent today.
ABI Research said growth in consumption of online video was due to a number of factors, including an increase in the amount of rich content available and more broadband connections.
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The growth of broadband – and YouTube – have helped this of course; but also the fact that video is so passonable these days, through blogs, social networking sites and other websites. Hands up those who posted that Tina Fey spoof of Sarah Palin on their Facebook profile?
But it’s not just TV shows on YouTube, now that it’s easier than ever to create, as well as simply watch and pass on. According to McConnell and Huba in their book Citizen Marketers (UK
| US
), in most online communities, about 1% of people contribute content. So you can reckon on about 1% of YouTube users actually creating videos. But this will surely increase as it becomes cheaper and easier.
It’s what William Gibson referred to in an interview last year as our new ability to mediate ourselves – something that would have seemed like science fiction just a few year ago.
Publishers should really be in that 1%, if they want to retain their position as content creators. And they should be facilitating their authors’ self-mediation. After all, it’s the individual, the personal, the authentic voice that works here – not the corporate marketing message. Plus we need to be where our market is – and that is increasingly online.
So go on. Grab a camera. Get mediating.
This is a really interesting article.
I am a self published writer (my friend and I co-authored an eBook this year “Reclaim Sex After Birth”) and this seems to be our next progression – into creating videos for YouTube.
As Peter so rightly points out – unless you are on the best selling list, it is still a huge slog, lots of woman hours at the computer and on the internet, to self promote yourself.
My friend and I decided to build our own website from scratch (something we’re both thankful for now that’s its almost finished), so we were spared the monetary expense of that, but not everyone has the time nor the nouse to be able to do that for themselves. And after all – writers want to write, they dont want to be out there promoting themselves. Don’t we all wish that there was someone out there that could do it for us – or we earnt enough to pay someone else to do it. The average Aussie writer earnt $10,000 last year (and I can only wish to have earnt that much). While an online presence is a must – there are many brilliant and unsigned writers out there, that still have difficulties in driving traffic to their blogs.
Video will be an interesting foray for us – as our information is for an niche market. I see that video can help build rapport with people, and help to establish a personalised presence on the net, but it still comes back to the same old – unless people know that you exist, no one is going to watch your YouTube contributions.
Much to muse on!
http://reclaimsexafterbirth.com
Jon,
Thanks for this post, and Ben for the comment about 1 Percenters. Most authors I’ve encountered, on or off the internet, have their own blogs or some other online vehicle for doing their own promoting, or “self-mediating,” as you put it, Jon. The long-standing issue of publishers simply being unable to promote all of their authors effectively in brick-and-mortar bookstores–for a variety of reasons–may have translated into a certain reluctance to vigorously provide content for readers and support for authors.
A post last June on Publishingtalk (“Do You Have Carving Anxiety?“) described what seemed an effective and creative content contribution by Simon & Schuster to the YouTube community to promote last year’s edition of the Joy of Cooking. What stops other publishers from doing such for their authors? Even if one only markets the big names, such an involvement in a tech trend or mainstay builds consumer interest in the company.
I know of at least one major publisher, that, in a packet it sends to its authors, explains how to make a blog, promote on the internet, etc.. Yet none of this information is anything one couldn’t obtain by doing a bit of research on Google. (Or on any FAQ provided by blog tools.) Even armed with such information, one isn’t necessarily better off than before: an author recently told me she had to shell out a couple thousand dollars of her own money to have someone build an inviting website for her, money her publisher would or could not reimburse. What makes video content different from standard web content? And while one can easily find videos of Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, or even Cormac McCarthy, lesser-known authors tend to have the same difficulty getting noticed online as they do on the shelf (especially if they are new to this facet of the internet). Beneath the question of how publishers facilitate their authors’ self-mediation lurks a smaller but perhaps more insistent inquiry into whether the ease and efficacy of internet video production will do anything that the other methods of self-mediation, online and offline, don’t do for the author who hasn’t broken traditional bestseller lists. (That is, the majority of them.) The video-viewing trend does present tremendous opportunities for authors and publishers both, but I wonder if “unfacilitated” self-mediation will decrease by any significant amount for most.
Thanks for the mention, Jon. It’ll be interesting to watch if the 1% rule changes, i.e, grows. My hunch is that it won’t, not because of the tools and their ease of use but more about the nomadic nature of people as creators vs. people as lurkers. I’ve been a 1 Percenter in some forums for a bit, then I move on.