Is ‘Amateur’ Online Video Doomed?
By Anna Johnson on March 4th, 2009I hate to say this (being the creator of a few amateurish online videos myself!) but it looks like Internet users are losing their interest in amateurish online videos. Well, why not, given the increasing number of professionally produced online videos?
In its recent report ‘Pro Online Video Views 1998–2012′ AccuStream iMedia Research found that professionally produced online video content grew by nearly 25 percent last year, and was viewed 41.6 billion times.
17 percent of that video content was originally produced for television and over 30 percent was professional video aimed at children.
As recently reported in Kikabink News, the most popular online videos on YouTube last year were all professionally produced.
Whilst none of this means you should abandon plans to create videos for your own marketing, the expectations of your audience are likely to rise over time.
Remember, back in the mid-1990s we all forgave people whose websites consisted of long, scrolling pages with black, starry backgrounds and white – sometimes blinking – text in the middle(!) Nowadays we wouldn’t spend more than half a second on such a site.
Expect the same phenomenon with online video.
There’s still a place for ‘amateurish’ videos – for example, on the odd occasion that an ‘amateurish’ look is part of the attraction. I think, however, that they’ll eventually become more of a liability than an asset when it comes to looking professional and eliciting trust from prospective customers.
Source: eMarketer, “Is Professional Content the Future of Online Video?” eMarketer, February 26, 2009
