Why the YouTube hasn’t replaced advertising on TV just yet
Today Mashable has published a piece on You-Tubes Most-Viewed Ads for 2010 and yes it includes the videos but it also provides us with the metrics we need to establish just how big the impact of YouTube has been so far in revolutionizing TV advertising.
Let’s begin by looking at the winners. The Old Spice Guy Ad was easily the most talked about YouTube campaign and it received 24.2 Million Hits. The winner with 45 Million hits was a piece for Evian called Roller Babies.
So we can safely assume that anything with more that 20 Million hits is going to be considered a runaway success story for a marketing campaign on YouTube.
Of course hits doesn’t mean uniques so lets assume that the average unique watches the video 1.25 Times. This conservative figure accommodates the majority of single viewers plus the real Fans who’ll watch it over and over again and any extra “free” clicks the agency might choose to throw in to get the hit count up. This translates into about 16 Million uniques or about the average nightly audience of a Top TV show on the free to air networks (Think: Desperate Housewives)
The problem of course is the 16 Million people watch Desperate Housewives get to see the Ad up to 10 times in the one hour time slot. So if we air the Ad on average 5 times per show we discover that Desperate Housewives outperforms YouTube by a factor of 5. Take into account the 23 shows in a season and we discover Desperate Housewives is 100x more effective than YouTube. Add in the TV shows either side of Desperate Housewives and we discover that Free to Air TV is 300 Times more effective than YouTube in deliver hits to eyeballs. After all why settle for 1.25 Hits per Unique when you can have hundreds?
This then is what interests me most about most social media commentary. Its ability to discover a speck of dust and put it under the microscope so it is amplified 100x, 1,000x or 10,000x more than its true value to advertisers and marketeers.
Which leads me to the role that Statistics plays in our comprehension of the web.
Last month we had a look at how little impact Facebook has had on Teenage TV viewing habits in the US in Profiting from the business of boredom. We discovered that while Teenagers 3.3 Hours a day watching TV they only spend 14 minutes on Facebook.
However earlier this month Mashable posted Americans Now Spend As Much Time Using Internet as TV [STATS]. So who is right? Who “owns” America’s eyeballs today? Is it TV or is it the Internet?
Well the answer can be found in this piece on Time Spent Watching TV Still Tops Internet by eMarketer. In this post Clark Friedricksen explains the methodology behind eMarketers figures
In simple terms they aggregate the figures from multiple sources and then publish an industry average. If you follow the link through to the post you will see 2 tables that illustrate the spread of estimates for viewing time on TV and the Internet.
Here we discover that the spread of the metric ‘the average time per day spent on the internet’ varies between 192 -33 minutes (i.e. a spread of about 6x) while ‘the average TV viewing habits’ are 317 – 111 Minutes (i.e. a spread of about 3x). This I find interesting simply because the Internet is a medium that has acquired a reputation for unlimited user metrics and yet the variance in the spread across the most fundamental metric is twice that of TV.
Basically the spread means you can shape the stats to reinforce any message you want to deliver. Is the Internet bigger than TV? Yes. Is TV bigger than the Internet? Yes. Are they the same? Yes. It all depends how selective you are in your sources.
Whenever I go in search of Stats on the net Mark Twain’s “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics” are never far away from my thoughts. So too an encounter I had with a technology consultant back in the mid 1990′s.
This man was a Mass Storage Guru working for one of the leading global brands at that time. One evening I was sharing a quiet ale or three and I asked him where did he get all those great stats from to support his business case? Well he said in the good old days we would use NYPOOYA but these days we just quote NOTI.
NYPOOYA? NOTI? I’d never heard of these industry sources so I asked him where would I find them?
Easy he replied: NYPOOYA are ‘numbers you pull out of your ass’ while NOTI are ‘Numbers off the Internet’ 
