BUSINESSES with video on their websites are benefiting from a widening competitive advantage over text-based sites as Google continues to reward “user engagement” with higher page rankings.
Video content scores extra points with search engines, outperforming text including blogs and news to deliver more visitors to websites.
Online video consumption grew by 37% in the UK last year according to market analysts ComScore, with business content accounting for a significant part of that growth.
Rankings may be one reason behind the massive global growth of web video, but it is also being driven by converging technologies and viewing habits as people increasingly watch video on their phones and TV on computers, on demand 24/7.
ComScore figures for April 2011 show 32.6m people in the UK watched a total of 5.4bn online videos. Worldwide, every day, over 3bn videos are viewed on You Tube alone.
Huge numbers initially driven by entertainment and social media, but new growth is being fuelled by factual and business content as more consumers simply expect to get information the same way and businesses recognise that online video can have the same power as TV at a much lower cost.
Extended distribution opportunities through commercial Facebook options and branded You Tube channels are also driving business uptake of web video.
Major players such as Intel forecast that there will be 500bn hours of video online by 2015. Cisco predicts that demand for video will drive a 400% increase in global internet traffic, accounting for 91% of all consumer IP traffic by 2014; as well as 60% of the world’s mobile data traffic by 2015.
However changing media consumption also means changing attitudes to content, with higher expectations placed on corporate and commercial productions because they are assessed against the total viewing experience including film, television, You Tube or anything else that is regularly watched.
Quality or “watchability” is the most important factor for the future.
Online you have maybe 20 seconds to engage the viewer. If you do, three minutes of video can deliver the equivalent of 30 minutes of text, so it’s very powerful.
But the page ranking advantage that drives traffic to a website only delivers if the content is worth watching both in terms of information and entertainment.
Viewers give a company or product a disproportionately poor rating if those three minutes have wasted their time.
Tony Harrison is operations director at Liverpool production company Brightmoon Media
