What's The Size The Online Video Advertising Market? All Depends On Who You Ask

If you're interested in getting a good sense on the size of the online video advertising market, you'd probably just look at one of the many analyst reports that give numbers on the growth in the industry. The problem is that looking at these reports gives you such a wide range of data, that it's nearly impossible to find two analysts who agree on similar numbers. I did a quick look up of some of the recent reports and found the following:

• In Dec of 08', Forrester Research said that the global online video advertising market will reach $7.2B by 2012. (source)

• In June of 08', eMarketer said the global online video advertising market would be $7.8B by 2012, $3B of which would come from the U.S. alone. (source) Then in August of 08', eMarketer cut that predicition down to $1B from the U.S. by 2012.

• In May of 08', IDC said that online video advertising will reach $3.8B by 2012. (source) But in April of 09', said the same market size will be $600M by 2012. (source)

• In June of 08', the Kelsey Group said that revenue just from local online video advertising alone would be $1.5B by 2012. (source)

• In Feb of 07', Borrell Associates predicts that the local online video advertising market will be $5B in 2012. (source)

• In Sept of 08', LiveRail said the online video advertising makret would be $1.3B in 2010. (source)

• In Aug of 08', Lehman brothers said the online video advertising market would reach $2.4B by 2012. (source)

• In Feb of 08', Parks Associates said the online video advertising market will be $6.6B in 2012. (source)

Clearly, no one seems to agree on the size of the market and the numbers have huge ranges. Compounding this problem is the fact that many of these reports don't outline exactly what they consider to be online video advertising revenue. Is it just ads played in the video, or also ads around the video?

I don't know what the size of the online video advertising market is and I've never tried to figure it out. But it's pretty hard for a niche industry like online video advertising to try and show everyone the growth taking place when the numbers being projected have a difference in the billions.

What I'd really like to know is what figure do the online video advertising vendors use in their slide deck when they are telling their investors the size of the market and the expected growth.

Comments

[shaun]

hilarious post. i've seen this over and over again anytime a market gets growing quickly. the forecasts for solar in 2012 made last year, or chinese economy size in 10 years, all have similar characteristics....

[Cameron Brain]

Really enjoy your pithy posts.

One commonality between these and other stats I've seen is the general contraction of growth projections for online video ad market.

To your last point: I think it probably doesn't (or maybe didn't) matter what vendors had in their decks; the general consensus for the past 3 years or so seemed to be that it was a given the video ad market was going to be huge.

[video]

How about the $50-60Bil/year in TV ad revenue - think some of that is going to online video? What %? History should serve as a guide with radio, newspaper, etc. with their ad growth and transition to other media.

The ads around the videos (companion) should be included for sure. In fact the home page takeover, sponsored, etc should also be included. As usual depends on what you are trying to measure....

Another good measure would be the gap between % of time spent watching online video vs the ad dollars chasing those eyeballs.