Pssssst: Wanna See a Growth Industry?

Pssssst: Wanna See a Growth Industry?

How about online video advertising?  Check this out from MediaPost, don’t burn yourself, it’s hot:

In October alone, Americans viewed 7.5 billion video ads, with Hulu generating the highest number of video ad impressions at more than 1.3 billion, according to comScore Video Metrix.

With the average viewer now consuming a record 21.1 hours of video a month, a total of 184 million U.S. Web users — or 86.2% of the country’s online population — watched more than 42 billion videos in October, comScore found.

Also worth noting, video ads accounted for 14.9% of all videos viewed — and 1.4% of all minutes spent viewing video online — in October.

Led by YouTube, Google sites still ranked as the top online video content property in October, with 161 million unique viewers and a record 20.9 billion videos viewed.

I view this as a huge positive for content companies with audience scale.  Advertisers are getting used to and pursuing the idea that commercials running on web video are equal to (or even superior to) commercials run on TV.  The local commercial business could become ginormous.  I view this as a net negative for legacy television networks, whose ad time proposition will lose luster and the competitive advantage as web video grows increasingly more professional and “ready for primetime”.  Eyeballs are eyeballs, whether a commercial is being seen on Politico.com on the web or Fox News on the tube.

What are the best stocks to play a trend this big?  Corning ($GLW) and Akamai ($AKAM) come to mind, but surely there are others…

Source:

Ad Supported Streaming Soars, Generates Huge Viewership (MediaPost)