Million Dollar Web TV News

For decades, we marketers (yes, we are ALL marketers), have been warned of the short attention span of our audience — and conventional wisdom says that as competition for attention gets stronger, attention spans get shorter. However, the way we “consume” content online is changing this.

The rise of Hulu and other network sites has had the effect of normalizing the watching of long-form video online. The MediaPost Research Brief reported two weeks ago that viewers are interacting with more long-form video. Even more telling, comScore’s June release has stats showing that average length of online video views increased by 15% between November 2008 and April 2009.

Viewers are becoming more willing to engage with longer form content, and this is translating into a willingness to consume longer advertisements; when given the choice, over 88% of Hulu viewers prefer to watch fewer but longer ads. INTERESTING!

Although this trend seems motivated by viewers feeling the pain of more frequent, short-form advertisements, it isn’t confined to viewers within interruption-based advertising systems like Hulu.

What does this mean? Are we are dealing with a new system, one that more closely aligns the goals of the consumer with the goals of the advertiser? As we start to accept that our audience wants choice in what it pays attention to, we may finally be realizing the benefits associated with providing that choice, along with incentives to pay attention to our or our advertiser’s brand.