New Media as New Media

Last year, YouTube announced a plan to "introduce a new type of ad module, where commercial messages are introduced as an overlay on the bottom 1/5th of the screen after 15 seconds of the clip. The overlay lasts for 10 seconds, and the user can either close or just choose to ignore it.”

The ads, running at $20 per 1,000 views, will only appear on videos from the company's content partners, that is, the approximately 1,000 companies and groups that have partnered with YouTube to show copyrighted content on the site.

A smaller video sharing company called VideoEgg has enabled the use of these ads for some time. "Troy Young, VideoEgg’s chief marketing officer, said the goal was to get away from forcing users to watch an ad before showing the clip they wanted to see. Those ads are known as 'preroll' and are the most common form of online video advertising so far." VideoEgg notes that 74.3 percent of U.S. Internet users stream video online and that in-stream ads “enhance rather than disrupt the user experience.”

In-stream ads seem like a positive step, considering that preroll ads smack of the television ads that are under assault from digital video recorders (DVRs). If digital technology is helping consumers to overcome old media, as expressed by DVRs and television ads, then why would consumers suffer an old media style approach (preroll) to another digital technology (online video)?

As Catharine Taylor relates in a BrandWeek article entitled, “New Media as Old Media”: “No one in the industry wants to return to the hype of bubbles gone by, but there is an undercurrent of concern that online is trying to be more like offline (read: traditional media) just at the point when digital TV technologies are changing traditional media.”

“By the time we finish repositioning new media to be 'apples to apples' like old media, old media will have evolved to be very much like new media," said Joseph Jaffe, a marketing consultant.