Will Online Video Be A Detriment To Commercialized Blogging?

If you take a good look around on the web, you will see media of all types from a wide range of people. Today, text is the most prominent—in recent years, blogs have prompted the average person to write content that can be seen by millions of people in a matter of hours or even minutes. However, the recent desire for video content must prompt many to question how commercialized blogging will fair in the future.

Commercialized Blogging Right Now

Blogs are an outlet for advertisers to spread the word about their products and services. This means that the content producers have a way to generate money. The more people that view the content, the more people that will view accompanying advertisements. Companies like Google have been able to take advantage of this.

Also, blogs are prime targets to be advertised on because the content on them can instantly be analyzed, and relevant advertisements can then be served to the readers. Each page on a blog is a new advertising opportunity. It works.

However, if we take a step back from everything to view the bigger picture, we all realize that video content on the web has caught on. Great sites (like YouTube and Vimeo) and better connections are giving this media format room to explode in growth and popularity. Some people even spend their entire days on sites like YouTube, and advertisers are determined to keep up with the people’s interests.

Video content is only going to get more popular, and the demand for high-definition content is already echoing throughout the world wide web. It might be said that advertising companies have failed to see the potential.

Problems With Video

There are some problems when it comes to commercializing video. As I mentioned before, blogs are a great asset to advertisers as they can be targeted on a post by post basis, but this is not accurately possible with online video yet. Yes, Google is experimenting with AdSense for video, but no one knows how that will pan out just yet.

There are also more problems arising as streaming video becomes more popular. With live streaming video, there are no tags or descriptions. There is no way—publicly known—to know what is going on within a live stream or what the audience is going to want to see in advertisements. How on earth will advertisers be able to cope with the situation? Seeing an advertisement for male enhancement on a stream intended for teenagers isn’t exactly effective.

This thirst for video content also comes with a high price—bandwidth is not cheap, and American internet service providers have already began capping the amount of data that can be used by customers. This cost will affect content producers and consumers.

In essence, for most people, it just doesn’t make sense to move away from text just yet. Kevin Rose said previously that Revision 3 is not profitable, and that pretty much sums up the results for a majority of people that attempt to do only video content distribution. It is best to use video as a tool to compliment an existing blog.

Future For Blogging

There will always be blogging, and there will always be opportunities to make money while blogging. For now, things are still looking bright for bloggers—even as the blogosphere becomes more crowded. Blogs that make money will continue to do so for at least the next five to ten years.

We must also consider that there are still plenty of opportunities for advertising companies to take advantage of text-based content. Don’t get me wrong, AdSense is quite alright, but there has to be better technologies that have yet to even be thought of. The online advertising industry is still relatively immature.

Will video be a detriment to those that make money blogging? There are many factors to consider. It might one day, but it might be a long while before we see any substantial draining of revenue for bloggers. The chances are higher that internet advertising as a whole will lose steam.

Just as print newspapers are now struggling, blogs will see the same happen in the future. However, the timeframe is likely to be great, and if that is what we have to work with, then we should embrace it for now.