I enjoyed the long Memorial Day weekend and, even though it’s Wednesday, I’m still trying to get back into the swing of things at work. Decompressing from getting caught up on email, I watched some TV last night and couldn’t help but to notice all of the (mostly car) commercials telling me not to miss their “Memorial Day Sales Event!” I’m was confused, since Memorial Day was over. That’s when one of the commercials said, “sale ends June 7.” I can appreciate a sale as much as the next person, and stretching a sale into a 2 week long event is fine… however, I just can’t see calling it a Memorial DAY sales event when it lasts 2 weeks. Come up with something better, like the “Kickoff to Summer Sale,” or the “More than just Memorial Day Sales Event.”
Online Video Viewing
According to comScore Video Metrix, U.S. Internet users viewed 11.5 billion online videos during March, 2008. That’s a 13% increase in just a month and a 64% gain over the same time last year. Google Sites ranked as the top U.S. video property with more than 4.3 billion videos viewed (38% share of all videos), gaining 2.6 share points versus the previous month. YouTube.com accounted for 98% of all videos viewed at Google Sites. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 477 million videos, followed by Yahoo! Sites and Viacom Digital.
Nearly 139 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 83 videos per viewer in March. Google Sites also attracted the most viewers (85.7 million), where they watched an average of 51 videos per person. Fox Interactive attracted the second most viewers, followed by Yahoo! Sites and Viacom Digital.
Other notable findings from the March survey include:
- 73.7% of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
- 84.8 million viewers watched 4.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (50.4 videos per viewer).
- 47.7 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (8.4 videos per viewer).
- The average online video duration was 2.8 minutes.
- The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.
UGC and Applebees
I know that everyone’s trying user generated content (UGC) nowadays, but the latest attempt by Applebees left me shaking my head. How many times do you find yourself at Applebees and someone decides to bust out their video camera? It’s not something that probably happens often enough that it deserves this campaign. Perhaps Applebees is hoping people will now bring their video cameras with them and will videotape, but this has the potential of easily backfiring… all it takes is one person to videotape what the food looks like when it arrives and compares it to the great looking picture in the menu. Based on their recent commercials, it looks like Applebees is planning to use the videos submitted to change up the first few seconds of their new commercials. It’ll be interesting to see how many videos actually get submitted. I guess you never know… there are plenty of aspiring actors and videographers out there.
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