Eyeballs and social networking to turn into ad revenues and stickiness in 2008

摘要

The coming year will prove a testing time for online video, as providers branch out into advertising and social networking, and move beyond the PC to the TV. The online video market exploded in 2007, with 230 million, or a quarter of all Internet users, visiting the website of market leader YouTube in October (see fig. 1). This growth has been matched by a rise in the number of services available, as other Internet startups, major broadcasters and consumer-electronics giants have entered the market with an array of novel models. For even the most established providers, 2008 will offer the first indications of which models will prove commercially viable. A key area of interest is advertising, which several providers hope will bring in enough revenues to support their bandwidth-hungry free video services (see "Online video" box).