DNS - Entertainment Content Touches Almost Everybody, Every Month

Entertainment content on the Internet is consumed by 99.6 percent of the U.S. population every month, representing 215 million people, according to MediaMind and comScore (News - Alert), and entertainment is the fastest growing activity on the Internet. 

 

Consumers on average visit entertainment-related sites 22 times each month, spending an average of 227 minutes visiting millions of pages of entertainment-related content. On average, 12 percent of a user's time online is spent engaging with entertainment-related content, researchers found.

 

In May 2010, for example, the 'humor' category grew 86 percent, in terms of unique U.S. visitors, compared to May 2009.  Unique visitors to entertainment news grew 54 percent over a year's time.  Unique visitors to general entertainment sites grew 33 percent, year over year. 

 

Statistics of that sort might partly explain the success Apple (News - Alert) has had with its iPad, which so far seems not so much a replacement for a PC, notebook or netbook, and more another mobile device used for casual and recreational applications such as media consumption. 

 

The entertainment focus also extends to rich media advertising. In the entertainment category, 74 percent of all ad impressions served in 2009 were rich media, compared to only 47 percent for all other verticals.

 

Entertainment advertising campaigns typically are designed to sell experiences, such as new movies, music, live performance, video games or TV shows. That obviously makes entertainment product advertising ideally suited to such campaigns. Movie trailers are the best example. 

 

First, they are typically launch campaigns, whose role is to generate awareness for what is essentially a new product with a short lifespan. That favors campaigns that build awareness very quickly, rather than over a period of years. 

 

Unlike other products that can build awareness over the course of years, entertainment products must complete the task in a short period. Ad campaigns for theatrical movies tend to be very short; more than half of the

campaigns lasting less than 60 days, comScore says. That lends itself to visuall appealing, high-engagement rich media advertising. 

 

High usage of rich media content and advertising also is possible because  products in entertainment can typically be fully grasped fairly quickly, and are easy to "sample". A trailer or a few songs from the album are likely to work better than a comprehensive description.

 

But the increasing amount of end user media, content and rich media consumption also is partly responsible for Apple's likely discovery of a new consumer product segment, much as its earlier iPod uncovered a new 'mobile music' product segment. 

 

Statistics such as these also explain why firms such as Netflix and Hulu are positioning for a much-larger role in online-delivered entertainment.