An interesting statistic in favor of online video is the advertising spend per hour of video watched: for 2009, eMarketer forecasts this as $0.17 for online vs. $0.13 for TV. With US online video penetration at 84%, the key ingredient to growing advertising revenue is through scaling engagement and maximizing the impact $0.17 per hour of video consumed has on market development. Using the online video growth rates from the eMarketer article and holding audience penetration constant, this requires monthly video consumption per viewer to grow from just over 200 minutes today to almost 1,200 minutes per month in 2013. To put this in perspective, the average television viewer watches over 9,000 minutes of TV programming per month today.

While achieving online engagement/consumption growth of this scale is achievable, it is not going to be done by providing the same consumption experience online as offline. The key drivers for encouraging online video consumption are availability of unique premium content, and a differentiated online video experience.

Premium content is critical for advertising dollars as marketers are still shying away from user generated content. While sites like Hulu are experiencing strong audience growth, there are too many alternatives to consuming made-for-TV content online in the form of DVRs, iTunes Season Passes and DVD rentals. Addressing the scarcity of premium online-only content through initiatives such as IAC’s announcement to team with Ben Silverman to start an online entertainment production company, will help drive online consumption; however, the high costs of producing quality content make the success of this approach far from certain.

In the short term, media companies need to focus on driving more consumption and engagement around multiplatform content. Online publishers still have a long way to go drive the discoverability of content through universal/onebox search, contextual inclusion of video on topic and article pages and video SEO. However, these challenges are understood and technology is available to assist with meeting these goals.

What’s missing is a compelling reason for consumers to go online to specifically watch video content that is also available on television. This can be addressed through delivering a more interactive, lean-forward consumption experience. Improving upon the current video model is not that complicated. By tapping into video metadata, web content management platforms and databases, and third party API’s, online video can become a more useful medium. For example, while consuming business media from a site like CNBC or Reuters, stock quotes and company headlines could be presented at the exact moment that a company name or CEO is mentioned. For sports, player stats, team schedules, and other relevant information can be incorporated into the user experience when players, teams and topics are mentioned.

These concepts are not really new—a lot of this overlays is what media companies such as CNBC and FOX Sports have been doing all along through their cable broadcast. The power of introducing these concepts online is that it creates a more interactive experience than television can possibly offer; I can pause the video to research a specific topic in depth before resuming the video, enabling me to consume information or be entertained on my terms, which, after all, is a core value proposition of online media.

Over the past 10 years, I have worked extensively with Yellow Pages publishers and directories globally on a variety of topics ranging from local search to SEO, search best practices to user experience. I have always been impressed with the scale of these businesses. According to Simba Information 2008 US Revenues for Yellow Pages was $16.6B with approximately 20 – 25% coming from the online channel. Serving a target market of the 23MM businesses in the US, directory publishers leverage this scale of business information to organize content into tens-of-thousands of topics and upsell enhanced listings, category inclusion, and detailed company profile pages to local businesses.

All of this content flows through the online product into search optimized landing pages which typically rank well with the crawlers. The directory publishers have convinced local merchants that paying for an enhanced listing drives leads both online and offline, and the reality is that a company profile page on an IYP site probably ranks better than the local merchant site as directory publishers invest heavily in SEO programs and benefit from scale of content.

On the surface, the role of video for a directory publisher seems to be another “enhanced” product that can be sold to the customer for several hundred dollars a year. The content is essentially a commercial for the local business. For companies that cannot produce their own videos, the IYP can create the script and send a small video production crew on-site to produce the video for a fee. This results in more meta-data and scripts which can then be used in the IYP publishing strategy to create additional SEO friendly content and pages, and can also be uploaded to YouTube to drive more leads. Publish a video site map and thumbnails from the video will appear in Google’s search results, driving higher click-throughs. At $300/year, selling this enhancement to 20,000 companies yields $6MM in margin friendly revenue. Great, we’re done.

As I thought more about this, however, I realized that this strategy might not make much sense. Sure, video content pages might generate more SEO referrals, but am I as the customer really going to watch 20 video commercials of local plumbers before deciding who to use? No. If I need a plumber, it’s probably time sensitive and I’m going to call them until I find one that is available at the right price. Furthermore, is there really any way to differentiate between vendors through a 30 second video? Probably not. The local business will likely see this as well and be less inclined to pay for this service. Lastly, for the directory publisher, $6MM in recurring revenue is interesting, but finding a way to grow it $60MM is the real goal. Selling one video to an advertiser every year doesn’t seem to provide this type of scale.

Another approach would be to look at video less as an advertisement and more as content that needs to be created and updated on an ongoing basis to make the directory site more interesting. For example, the directory publisher could license content from or contract with well known subject matter experts to create informational video related to a specific topic. For example, having Bob Vila produce a series of short-form “how to” home improvement videos would completely change the usefulness of the IYP to a consumer.

Each video could be associated with IYP advertisers that provide relevant products and services. Advertisers would likely pay the IYP for premium sponsorship positions against individual videos as the consumer has credibly identified themselves as being interested in the topic. Bob Vila, Martha Stewart, Consumer reports are all brands that come to mind that could produce content relevant to the IYP experience, and I suspect that most IYP advertisers would be willing to pay significantly to be associated with these brands in the right context.

Additionally, IYP’s could learn from sites such as Demand Media and Howcast media that have specialized in producing large volumes of video at low cost by paying netizens to produce good quality video on a variety of topics. Lastly, rather than selling an individual video advertisement to a local merchant, the IYP could sell a package of videos to local merchants with each episode covering different topics, such as product demonstrations, how-to, service differentiators, etc.

Directory publishers have a unique opportunity to incorporate video content into the IYP user experience in a manner that makes the directories more useful and educational, benefiting both consumers and advertisers. Let’s hope that they avoid the “obvious” strategy and don’t end up just selling video advertisements. Otherwise, they will end up missing out on a lucrative opportunity, just as they missed out on the sponsored listings phenomenon.

What is internal syndication?  It is the notion of disparate business units within a media conglomerate sharing content across the various web properties based on which business produced the most relevant content for a particular topic.  For example, if I search for “swine flu NYC” on foxnews.com, it’s is likely that the local FOX TV affiliate, MyFoxNewYork, has more in-depth local coverage of the assistant school principal who passed away this past weekend.  Indeed, if I perform this search on foxnews.com, there is no video on the topic, however, there is video dedicated to the story on MyFoxNewYork.  As a visitor to FOX News looking for video on this story, I now leave the site and go to Google to find the video I am looking for and FOX has lost advertising impressions.  Similarly, if I am on the MyFoxNewYork site and am interested in the global pattern of spread of swine flu, FOX News has the most relevant video covering the epidemic.

Why is internal syndication important? The obvious answer is that the economics of news production and gathering have turned very unfavorable over the past couple of years.  Indeed Rupert Murdoch has recently formed a global editorial hub designed to break-down the content silos within News Corp and share content across the organization.   Makes sense—why are FOX Business and The Wall Street Journal both producing expensive video on the same topics and stories independent of each other?  Why is the New York Post, also a News Corp publication, producing video at all, when it can leverage both local and national video from MyFoxNewYork and FOX News?

Content production is a sunk cost and in order to maximize the return on that investment, the advertising opportunity must be fully exploited.  This is particularly true for video content where the production costs are steeper than with articles.  A single piece of video covering a particular story making its way across the vast News Corp empire is more likely to recover its production costs than individual sites producing their own video solely for distribution on their site.

Internal syndication of video content is also important for developing audience metrics.  Right now, my news gathering experience is fragmented as I use several sites to gather local, national, and global news, and for getting updates on certain topics, such as sports and politics.  Essentially, I give 8 – 10 different websites, across different media conglomerates a piece of my advertising mindshare.  This morning I decided to see if I could fill me information gathering needs by looking for video only on News Corp properties:  local weather (MyFoxNewYork); update on the swine flu epidemic in NYC (MyFoxNewYork); a scan of the latest videos on politics (FOX News); what to expect at the opening bell on Wall Street (WSJ.com); highlights from the Yankees Game (FOX Sports) and from the NBA Playoffs (FOX Sports).  Wouldn’t it be great if I could get if I could dynamically create a personalized video playlist from across all of these sources each morning and watch it from one site?  It seems that a typical media conglomerate could drive significant increases in video engagement metrics and advertising inventory if it could break down the content silos that exist between businesses.

Corporate politics is the likely reason why we don’t see more internal syndication.  Each business unit produces as much content is it can in order to support mutually exclusive advertising sales teams which compete against each other for marketing dollars.  While the consumer is impacted, competitor content is only one click away, so the real loser in this situation is the parent company which loses incremental advertising dollars and struggles to recoup production costs.  Why not incentivize internal syndication by carving-up the advertising inventory like the cable companies do so that the content producer and the distributor both benefit?  Why not require co-branding of content to support brand development of the lesser-known property that produced the actual video?

Video content is highly valuable in-terms of the advertising revenue it can generate—let’s face it, people would rather watch the news than read it.  Yet, the challenge for most news agencies is creating the scale of video consumption to support a meaningful revenue stream and right now, traditional media companies end-up competing against themselves rather than focusing on the bigger-picture challenge of creating online businesses.  Video advertising forecasts have been revised downward in 2009 due in part to the recession but also due to the lack of scale with the trusted brands—advertisers are still hesitant to advertise on YouTube because the risk of an ad being served against controversial content is still high.  It seems that several media conglomerates—Disney, NBCU, Tribune, Scripps, News Corp and others—have the potential to leverage their content production scale through internal video syndication to grab market share from YouTube.

When discussing the online radio format, most people think about the challenging dynamics associated with the music format:  radio has an unfair economic advantage as they don’t need to pay royalties, Last.fm and Pandora will struggle to support royalty requirements exclusively through advertising dollars, Rhapsody and Napster have strong subscriber-level economics but achieving scale and business model longevity are open questions.

However, when I think about radio broadcasting in the context of local media and the local advertising opportunity, I think about the “infotainment” category which includes news, weather, sports, politics, business media, and other talk radio categories.  Interesting insights can be drawn from a survey of engagement metric comparisons (all stats from Compete):

What is driving the strength of online radio’s engagement metrics?  I think there are three primary drivers:

Compelling content. Most news/talk radio stations produce extremely relevant content to our daily information needs – traffic, weather, sports scores, etc. – that drive our initial entry to the site and lead us to engage with additional content of interest.

Relevant packaging. Most news/talk radio content is packaged into snackable clips that require and minimal time and attention to consume the relevant information.

The third has to do with the radio format itself.  It is the ultimate in portability.  As opposed to a newspaper or television, I can multitask while consuming information – in my car, at home doing chores, at work streaming through my computer.  Compared to video, the streaming quality of online audio is more consistently reliable, especially at the workplace.

I would also argue that in-stream audio advertising has just as meaningful a market opportunity as in-stream video.  News/talk radio ads tend to be short and unobtrusive, as they blend in well with the underlying content.  They are cheap to produce and it is easy to repurpose the 10 – 15 second on-air ads for streaming.  They are relevant both geographically (hyper-local) and contextually (financial service ads associated with business news segments).  Audio ads also don’t require that you be watching the screen to fully comprehend the marketer’s message.  Lastly, the target market for in-stream audio advertising is the millions of small businesses across the country, as opposed to the handful of national advertisers.  Essentially, broadcast radio has a Google AdSense-type of opportunity – very short, relevant, unobtrusive ads that are affordable to millions of business owners.

The key to online success, however, is scaling audience reach.  The table above demonstrates that compelling content drives engagement, however, the audience stats are too narrow to drive a meaningful business.  Thoughts on where to invest are as follows:

Usability. Eliminate the clutter and focus on getting customers to relevant content quickly. I’m still amazed at the complexity and quantity of clicks required to get to target content. As with all content-driven sites, search and navigation tools are the most used applications. Sites like WEEI have invested in Universal Search capabilities (singe search results interface unifying all content types) and widgets that prominently display most popular and related content throughout the site. And of course, good usability and site design drives SEO success.

Aggregation. Success in the local market requires that publishers look beyond their own content for relevant stories and information in order to become a local online media hub. Boston.com (The Boston Globe website) has done this to great effect and is now a leading aggregator of content relevant to New England from a variety of local media outlets. Another spin on aggregation is CBS Radio’s recently launched play.it site which is a portal into all of the content that the 100+ stations produce. This allows the consumer of content in the local market to expand their media gathering nationally (finding all sports news, as opposed to just NY team scores).

Personalization. Local news and information is great content for personalization. This can be achieved through RSS feeds – allow the visitor to subscribe to a feed for a particular topic or search query – or through more sophisticated alerting platforms that allow the user to enable real-time alerts and alerts at specified times throughout the day (for example, weather at 7AM before I leave for work; traffic at 6PM before I start my evening commute, etc.).

Now, imagine if troubled Sirius XM published archive and promotional content to an ad supported site and used it is a means to convert users to paying subscribers…definitely achievable by combining their excellent content with multimedia site publishing best practices. 

Not a day goes by where we don’t read about evaporating print and classified advertising dollars, learn about significant lay-offs, or struggle to comprehend the magnitude of financial stress that the newspaper industry is under. But for all of its gloom-and-doom, the online aspect of newspaper publishing has a few things going for it:

Strong demand for consumption of the online product. While print readership continues to decline at alarming rates (30% per year, according to Piper Jaffray), online audience, pageviews, engagement, and visits are all up by more than 8% – 10% in 2008.

Forecasted local ad dollars. Online ad spending is still expected to grow in 2009. According to Borrell Associates, local online ad spending totaled $12.9B in 2008 and will grow at 8% in 2009. While this may seem like paltry growth, online local ad spending looks strong when compared to Barclay’s 2009 forecast for total US newspaper ad dollars to decline by 17% this year.

Online competitive advantage. Newspapers have been running online operations for over a decade, giving them valuable operating experience, strategic insight and “Online DNA” when it comes to competing for local advertising dollars.

I can’t overemphasize this last point enough. In my interactions with Boston.com (publisher of the Boston Globe and a New York Times company), I am always impressed with their technology and web publishing infrastructure, their trained online sales team, their understanding of audience development programs, and their grasp of customer needs, such as providing a compelling local search application. This level of web infrastructure and savvy-ness is not common with all mainstream media.

Targeting the audience for local media, and the associated ad dollars, is going to be led by three main constituents in the media sector: local newspaper publishers, local television, and local radio. Clearly a multi-platform content approach, combining local, national, and global news across text, audio, and video is required in order to maximize audience penetration and engagement metrics. Newspapers clearly have a lead in audience metrics, as they have been online for many years. However, the increasing popularity of video consumption, especially news content, could challenge the lead the newspaper publishers currently enjoy by driving visitors to site that are in the business of producing and publishing multimedia. According to eMarketer, online video consumption reaches 80% of the US online audience and 55% of active video viewers watch news clips regularly.

For newspaper sites to succeed in the online video race, they need to do two things well:

Produce and/or acquire content. Producing high quality, information rich video is not cheap. In addition to the production process, stories need to be researched, scripts need to be prepared, and journalists need to rehearse. It’s not uncommon for even the largest newspaper publishers to produce only 5 – 10, 3 minute clips per week due to the high costs associated with content creation. In order to round-out the video content offering, publishers need to pursue syndication strategies. Boston.com is an excellent example of a newspaper site that jump-started its online video efforts primarily by becoming an aggregator of local video content. This can be acquired cheaply, by subscribing to relevant YouTube channels and embedding the YouTube player on a site, albeit at the cost of advertising control. A more costly approach in the short term is to pay for syndication rights for video, an avenue which provides more advertising upside to the site. I’ve seen customers pursue both avenues to great success.

Develop a video SEO strategy. As everyone is aware, multimedia provides particular SEO challenges due to lack of metadata and flash-based media players. No one knows the ins-and-outs of SEO more than newspapers, most of which have been managing effective programs for their text content for several years. Applying the same SEO fundamentals to video content is the best way to jump-start audience development for a new media offering and newspaper publishers are in a great position to leverage internal SEO know-how that competitors are not likely to have.<

Of course, video SEO is not as simple as it sounds. Beyond embedding a media player in crawler friendly HTML, assigning well-formed URL’s, and writing descriptive titles and summaries, there are a host of other issues that need to be addressed, such as video analytics, transcript creation, topic page development, video CMS, etc.

With a well thought-out content strategy and video SEO program, It is not uncommon to see 75% – 100% year-over-year increases in stream starts for a newspaper. This is of the toe-hold that a newspaper needs in order to create to build a meaningful video offering that can be directly monetized through in-stream ads. However, the “how” of video SEO is often the missing piece of the strategy, leading a potentially valuable content offering to the online equivalent of solitary confinement.

Most experts recommend that tapes be converted to digital format within 5 to 10 years of being recorded and estimate the shelf life of magnetic tape at 15 years, perhaps longer if stored at a constant 21 degrees Celsius and 40% relative humidity level.  Even if the archives are preserved under perfect conditions, over time the tapes stretch and lose their signal strength, eventually rendering the media useless.  In conversations with customers over the past few months, I’ve come to realize just how “reel” this problem is. One of the largest networks of local news broadcasters informed me that they are scrambling to digitize archives en masse as they are literally about to lose content that was recorded in the 1960′s – 1980′s.

Think about the treasure trove that is contained in these archives: Day-by-day updates on every presidential election and key national issues, such as The Bay of Pigs; every speech and event in Martin Luther King’s career; the first moon walk;  every key sporting event; etc…

So why the concern?  It seems obvious that every TV station should be converting their archives to digital format.  It typically comes down to cost and ROI.  Let’s assume that a typical TV station produces 4 hours of news content per day.  That’s 1,460 hours per year.  Assuming that the archive consists of 35 years of tape, that’s 51,100 hours of content per station.  Assuming that a local broadcast group consists of 20 stations, that’s 1 million hours of content.  From what I’ve heard, the variable costs of converting analog tape to digital are approximately $20/hour.  So this one group of broadcasters needs a $20.4 million budget just to convert the footage.  If you assume that auto creation of metadata, through speech-to-text, natural language processing, and image recognition adds another $10/hour, the total cost is $30 million.  This does not include the up-front costs involved in buying the hardware and software, shipping costs to send the tapes to/from the processing center, and any editorial effort involved in creating titles, descriptions, clips, etc…

The costs are significant, and justifying such a large budget in today’s economy and advertising market for “preservation-sake” is very difficult.  Just as with every project in any corporation, there needs to be a profit motive to back-up the expense.  Here are three opportunities for the archive that can yield ROI-positive business plans:

Create a media Wikipedia. Think about the value of a media-centric Wikipedia.  A destination where I can come to watch every speech and event in Joe Biden’s 38-year political career or learn about such important topics as The Cold War or the Space Shuttle disasters.  Through metadata analysis, it’s possible to organize a news archive by topic, entity, date, and geography, making it quite easy to dynamically discover and consume information. Add the social media element to the equation and you have a scalable way for creating editorial metadata, such as descriptions and story summaries that would be costly to otherwise create.  At the very least, such an effort would have a halo-effect onto the media company that did this.  However, set-up as a .org, this effort could potentially be underwritten through foundations and grants and, of course, there are advertising opportunities associated with this.

Create an education site. One of the most impressive archive efforts to date is NBCU’s iCue site where the archives are presented as an education tool, where anyone can learn about different events and topics, create “stacks” of clips that are interesting, and engage in any number of interactive games to test one’s knowledge of history.  Efforts like this provide educational/subscription opportunities as well as sponsorship/advertising opportunities—what advertiser doesn’t want to get in front of 13 – 18 year olds?

Create a news site extension. Last, and perhaps the most obvious, is bolting the news archive onto the existing site.  The rationale here is simple: More relevant and interesting content drive traffic, engagement, and advertising opportunities.  If I could go to my local news site (NYC) and, while watching last night’s highlights from the Giants game, have the opportunity to view highlights over the past 20 years, I would surely spend more time on the site.   Also, as we all know, more content provides more SEO opportunity and, hence, larger audience reach.

Content is the media industry’s most valuable asset.  This applies not only to recent media, but to the archive as well—just look at all of the historic TV shows that I can watch on YouTube.  In a market where traditional media is struggling to create unique and compelling online experiences and business models, the archive represent a differentiator that can jump-start audience building and monetization initiatives.  Not only is it an important representation of world history that must be saved for “preservation-sake”, the archive represents a large, untapped online opportunity.  Who will be first to realize its potential?

Stephen Baker is the Chief Revenue Officer of EveryZing, Inc, and has been in the search industry for over a decade.  Stephen’s roles have included Vice President of AlltheWeb (now part of Yahoo!), General Manager of FAST (now part of Microsoft), and CEO of Search for Reed Business Information. The Video Search column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Why all of the interest around speech-to-text?

First, a quick primer in speech-to-text. Speech recognition engines have been around for decades, however, their application to web-scale applications is relatively new. A speech recognizer essentially “listens” to audio or video files in order to create a text transcript of the spoken word incorporating different language models and controlled vocabularies in order to drive accuracy. Once processed, the transcript can be used in several down-stream applications, including search, publishing, content management, and categorization. The value is obvious to web publishers: the actual content and context, or “aboutness”, of an audio or video file are captured in what is said and is essential to compliment the editorially provided title, description, and tags. Without the transcript, content is invisible to web crawlers and site search applications. The analog would be Yahoo! or Google building a new search engine for web pages that only indexed the title and tags, while ignoring the body text of the document – not very useful.

When thinking about the relevance of speech-to-text in a content discovery setting, it’s important to understand how multimedia content is currently discovered online. According to hitwise, between April 2007 and April 2008 the paradigm for multimedia content discovery has shifted significantly in favor of search engines:

1. Direct navigation, where content is discovered by going directly to a publisher’s web site, has remained steady over the past year, accounting for approximately 42% of referrals to online video.

2. Social/viral media, where content is discovered on sites such as MySpace and YouTube, accounted for 36% of video referrals in April 2007, dropping to 29% in April of 2008.

3. Search engines, such as Yahoo!, MSN, and Google, provided 22% of referrals in April 2007, increasing to 29% in April 2008.

Why the shift? This can be explained primarily by two factors. The first is that the audience that consumes online multimedia continues to grow in terms of size and amount of content they consume regularly. As video consumption goes mainstream, one would expect that the web audience relies more heavily on search engines for content discovery, just as they do for text content. In fact, it’s not uncommon for web searches to have “audio” or “video” appended to their phrases to bias SERPs towards multimedia content.

The second factor driving this shift is the amount of professionally produced content that is published to the web. Contrary to popular belief, most of the video watching internet audience is not interested in consuming user generated content. Rather, they are looking to the convenience and personalization that the web offers to provide a more engaging video watching experience for high quality, professionally produced content. As the business model comes into focus, big media is responding by publishing more content to their web sites. Statistics from eMarketer reveal that premium content accounts for more than 90% of monthly streams:

1. Entertainment, including movies, television shows, cartoons and trailers, makes up approximately 50% of all streamed content.

2. Infotainment, including current events, weather, sports and entertainment news, business media, and infomercials, represents approximately 40% of streamed content.

3. User generated, including amateur content, home movies, and other low-budget web-only content, make-up the remaining 10% of streamed content (not surprisingly, while YouTube has 37%+ share of streams viewed, the vast majority of these are apparently not streams of user generated content).

For the purposes of content discovery, speech-to-text analysis is most relevant when applied against Infotainment content. Most people don’t “search” for Entertainment content as they are already aware of the brand and know where to go to consume the content. If I am interested in watching “The Office”, I simply go to its website. This must account for most of the direct navigation referrals reported by hitwise. Furthermore, searching within the transcript of a typical sitcom is less interesting as the content has minimal informational value. User Generated Content, on the other hand, suffers from lack of spoken word – typically less than 30% of UGC contains a speech audio layer. UGC is also consumed based on what’s popular, what has been shared with me, and how it is tagged. In other words, UGC is driven by “browsing”, not search.

Infotainment, on the other hand, is topic-driven. Political content is about “candidates”, “vice presidential nominees”, “universal health care” and “the war in Iraq”. Sports media is about “Alex Rodriguez” and business media is about “the mortgage meltdown”. When people are interested in learning about topics, more often than not, they rely on search engines to discover content. Hence, a typical text-based content site generates more than 20% of monthly referrals from the crawler based engines.

As audio and video gradually replaces text-based content consumption on the web, consumers expect multimedia content to be readily findable within the major search engines. While this is intuitive, gaining inclusion of video in the search engines is difficult due to the flash-based applications that house the video and the lack of text describing the content. With much of the informational value of Infotainment content trapped within the spoken word, speech-to-text applications provide a scalable and cost effective means for unlocking content and presenting it to crawlers, hence, placing multimedia content on equal footing as text-based content. The same search uplift can be applied in a site search setting, where content discovery and consumption is measured by the efficacy of “recall” and “precision”. In this context, “recall” is impaired due to lack of descriptive text – if the content isn’t included in the result, then how could it possibly be discovered?

In a future post, I’ll discuss the advantages of transcript creation using automated speech-to-text applications versus human editors, the challenge of leveraging closed captioning in online settings, and “how accurate” is “accurate enough” for a transcript to be useful.

To answer this question, it is useful to understand the key growth drivers and their relative contribution to the anticipated market growth. For video advertising, Audience Development, CPM Increases, and Video Consumption are the most relevant factors. According to eMarketer, video advertising represented a $410MM market in the US in 2006. Using this as a base, let’s analyze how these growth drivers might build to $4B by 2011:

Audience development: According to eMarketer, video consumption is expected to grow to 165MM US uniques by 2011, up from 88MM in 2006. This doubling of audience should yield a doubling of available advertising inventory and, holding fill rates constant, yield an additional $410MM of video advertising dollars, contributing 10% towards the $4B market. This increase in the online population consuming multimedia will be driven by broadband penetration and volume of video content available online.

CPM increases: As ad formats become standardized and as the supporting ad serving technology becomes more sophisticated, the contextual and behavioral approaches to targeting that Google, Overture (Yahoo!), and others pioneered will become applicable to instream ads. Combined with the accountability that online advertising provides, video consumers will find video ads more relevant to their interests and pay closer attention to their messages, hence increasing the value of video advertising to marketers. Looking at the historical CPM growth of Google and Overture, it is not unrealistic to expect video advertising CPM’s to increases 20 – 30% annually through 2011. To put this in perspective, this assumes that effective CPM’s grow from $10 to $30 and we already hear claims that the Wall Street Journal online commands multimedia CPM’s in excess of $50 and that news sites are selling at a rate card of $20 – $30 CPM’s. This growth would fuel another $1.2B of market growth, contributing 30% towards our goal of $4B.

Video consumption: Based on the existing market size and the assumed contributions of audience and CPM growth, we are still missing the $2B required to yield a $4B market. This will come from increases in video consumption of content – commonly referred to as engagement. According to eMarketer, video consumers watched an average of 85 minutes per month by the end of 2006. Assuming that the number of advertising impressions correlates with consumption, the average online video watcher would need to consume 425 minutes of video/month by 2011 to yield $2B in advertising dollars. Given that this number has already grown to 235 minutes/month as of March 2008 (comScore), it is not a huge stretch to imagine that video consumption will exceed 425 minutes/unique/month by 2011.

Based on the above analysis, the media industry needs to be focused on developing a highly engaged set of loyal customers in order to build video advertising market share online. Easier said than done. Currently (according to comSCore), YouTube attracts 62% of online video viewers and is responsible for over 37% of delivered streams, and, as we all know, most major media outlets don’t look favorably upon YouTube’s position in the market – very reminiscent of Google and Yahoo!’s triumphant march earlier this decade, when in 2005 they generated more advertising dollars than the top 10 global print publishers did online and offline.

To position themselves for maximum revenue generation, media companies need to pursue the following four strategies:

Publish more content to the web: Many media outlets only publish 10% of programming to their websites. As consumption shifts online, video consumers expect the full range of content and programming to be available. Like web search, comprehensiveness of the offering is key to building trust that information and entertainment needs will be satisfied.

Leverage the archive: Media companies’ most valuable assets potentially lie in their archives. If Wikipedia has created a dominate position as an online resource, imagine the power that a typical media company can unleash by offering its archive to consumers for research, entertainment, or pure nostalgia purposes.

Create “lean-forward” experiences: Unlike linear programming mediums, the web offers the ultimate in interactivity. From simple features, such as related videos and searching within video, to advanced interactivity, such as displaying relevant content from other sources – show me Derek Jeter’s latest stats when he is mentioned in a sports highlight – content sites must continue to give consumers a reason to spend time at their site vs. television and competitive online offerings.

Invest in “discovery” programs: Today it is difficult to find multimedia files on a typical content site. Investing in multimedia site search applications and editorially driven integration of multimedia will help draw visitor’s attention to video content. Similarly, pursuing video SEO and long-tail distribution/syndication strategies tap into existing and powerful content discovery paradigms. Lastly, YouTube can also be a powerful driver of audience to target sites as recent promotional efforts by Hulu are proving.

It’s still early days for online video advertising. Instead of focusing on the best way to monetize video content, media companies should be focused on how to attract and retain users. Innovation in product offerings and investing in unique experiences, combined with the natural competitive advantage that media companies have with regards to content should be the short-term focus that will yield future monetary success.

Stephen Baker is the Chief Revenue Officer of EveryZing, Inc, and has been in the search industry for over a decade, including Vice President of AlltheWeb (now part of Yahoo!), General Manager of FAST (now part of Microsoft), and CEO of Search for Reed Business Information. The Video Search column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.