The Rising Popularity of Video News Online

Finally, a report (PDF format)) from the Online Publishers Association about which I agree!

Its study of 27,841 Internet users on 25 of its members sites found that watching video online is becoming increasingly popular and that news videos were the most popular form of that content.

Twenty seven percent of those users view online video at least once per week and five percent of them view it daily. A majority of users (51 percent) watch video online at least once per month.

Perhaps because worktime is for work, online video viewers were more likely to watch from home than work: 35 percent said they frequently watch online video from home and only 16 percent said they did so from work. However, the numbers who said they occasionally do was closer: 40 percent from home versus 32 percent from work. Combine those frequencies and 85 percent of users watch online videos from home at least once per month and 48 percent do so from work.

News was the favorite form of content (66 percent), followed in popularity by cinema clips or trailers (49 percent), music videos (29 percent), and sports videos (27 percent). The study doesn’t mention it, but keep in mind that 14 of the 25 OPA websites on which the users were polled are devoted to general news, business news, and sports news, so some of the results might be self-selecting.

The study found a significant gender skew among online video viewers: 63 percent were male, though only 49% of all Internet users were. I wonder how much of that 14 percent difference was simply due to the online availability of sports videos probably being much more popular among men than women? The report noted that sports videos were the most frequently watched form of content, viewed slightly more frequently and much longer than news videos.

Seventy percent of the Internet users have seen a video advertisement online. Remarkably, 44 percent of them (31 percent of the total) took some positive action (checked out a Web site, went to a store, or purchased, etc.) towards the product as a result of seeing the ad.

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.