More evidence of how the proliferation of broadband is changing the media landscape: Pew says that 57 million Americans watch online video content every day. That's 19% of American adult Internet users.
Americans between ages 18-29 are the most video-voracious; 31% of them watch online videos every day.
What are American adults watching? News, primarily, followed by comedy, movies or TV, music and surprisingly (to some, I imagine) commercials! 13% of American adults report they have downloaded or watched video ads.
The upshot of Pew's report is that word of mouth figures prominently about how popular videos spread: Two out of three video viewers ages 18-29 send links to video files, compared with half of Americans age 30 and older. Forty-two percent of the 18-29 year-olds send video links a few times per month or more.
My take on this is two-fold:
- You are either old or a laggard if you aren't producing video-based content on a regular basis. Right now, that makes me an old laggard.
- A job title of the future for marketing departments is Video Producer. Like a news producer at a television station, she decides every day what's worth covering at the company and produces a short video segment for YouTube, the company blog or even the company intranet.
Telling your company's ongoing story on a daily or weekly basis via online video is looking a lot like the future of marketing and advertising.
