Monthly Archives: May 2008

Online Video – Not Here Yet – How a Big Number isn’t really That Big

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 12, 2008 View Comments

Comscore (via Allen Stern at CenterNetwork) reports that 11.5 billion videos were watched online in March in the U.S.  11.5 billion sounds like an awfully big number.  But it’s not.  At least not in terms of web scale.  Comscore itself estimates that total page views online are estimated in the trillions per month.  Heck even my company, Lookery, a demographic-based ad network that’s less then a year old delivered almost 3 billion ads in April. It’s estimated that MySpace and Facebook combined do more then 100 billion page views a month.

And Comscore which likely undercounts pages views by a factor of 2 to 3x is OVERstating videos.  In their stats, they estimate the AVERAGE online user watches 83 videos a month!  Seriously.  Personally I can’t believe that stat.  I’m as addicted to the Internet as the next guy and I watch maybe 30 videos a month.  Maybe.

So even if you take Comscore’s numbers at face value, 11.5 billion isn’t that big of a number when you look at the economic size of the video market.  Assuming a range of $1 to $5 cpm and 1 ad per video (any format, method, size, style doesn’t really matter), you’re looking at a TOTAL market size of just $11.5 million to $57.5 million for all online video.  That’s out of a total online ad market of about $2 billion a month.

My point isn’t to say online video won’t be or isn’t important.  It’s more a comment about the incredibly large scale required to build a large media business or market.  The media business is about a little off a whole heck of a lot.  That’s why ads are priced in cost per thousands.  And the need to have immense scale also explains why the media business gravitates towards consolidation but that’s a post for another day.  When videos viewed starts approaching trillions then we’ll be somewhere.

Cool Link: The Genographic Project – An Atlas of the Human Journey

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 9, 2008 View Comments

I heard about the Genographic Project while watching a documentary on some 4,000 year old European mummies found in Eastern China.  The Genographic Project is tracing the lineage and migration of humanity using mitochondrial DNA.  To a geek like me this is some very cool stuff.  They have a cool website that is well worth checking out (link).

The Genographic Project recently had a press release that traces back our genetic adam and eve to about 60 to 70 thousand years ago in East Africa.  What’s interesting about that is they have also determined that the first modern humans date to about 200,000 years ago.  Apparently from 200,000 years ago to about 70,000 years ago – humans migrated and populated most of Africa and then seemingly due to climate change (possibly linked to a massive volcanic eruption in Sumatra 73,000 years ago that was 3,000 (!!!) times stronger then the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980) the population collapsed to what they estimate of only 2,000 people in East Africa.  And from that small population and from one man and one woman within it – every modern human today can be traced too!  Note – when they say genetic adam and eve that ‘s the woman and man whose dna we can trace ourselves too – it means any prior genetic diversity doesn’t exist in the gene pool of modern humanity.

And from that time – the project traces via genetic variation the migration of humanity across the globe and how quickly it expanded, overlapped and crossed paths.  Great stuff.

Here’s a picture of the map of human migration (an interactive one exists on the site):