Nielsen is wrong.
Forget the intro, I’m jumping right in -
Contrary to some recent popular media coverage suggesting that more Americans are rediscovering “free TV” via the Internet, computer video tends to be quite small with an average time of just two minutes (a little more than 0.5 percent) a day.
WRONG. There is a major fallacy in the logic. I’m surprised it hasn’t been picked up, and even more surprised that it’s being somewhat propagated by NewTeeVee. The problem with this statement is that television distributed via the Internet is an extremely SMALL portion of all the video available on the web. Drawing conclusions from averages say nothing of the growth that exists within the Internet Television (ITV) domain. Here’s the original Nielsen/CRE press release.
From the archives of the ITVT Newsletter:
ABC.com users watched a record 815 million minutes of full-length episodes on the player during the month, representing a 53% increase over the previous month and a 110% increase over May, 2007. In addition, ABC says, viewers watched 37 million episodes, representing an increase of 27% over the previous month, and each viewer generally watched multiple episodes during the month.
…and further down in the same release:
Since launching in 2006, approximately 400 million episodes have been initiated through the ABC.com Full Episode Player.
So what’s wrong with this picture? It’s a fundamental problem that the industry has been avoiding for the past few years. There is a clear difference between “video being distributed over the public Internet” and “long form episodic content being distributed over the public Internet, for consumption on computers, laptops, mobile devices and (gasp) televisions!”
The real shame in all of this is the industry’s lack of attention to this playout environment. There is a lot of opportunity for advertising in 400m episodes. To be more precise, there are over 1 billion opportunities for ads in ~400m episodes.
Update: In all fairnes to Chris and the NewTeeVee staff, they do call out concern for that data point. However, it’s not done until the very last paragraph, while the front page summary leaves the claim unchallenged.