The Runaway Engine That Couldn't

An interesting, if not surprising, report from U.K.-based Screen Digest has predicted that the careening choo-choo train of user-generated content will not produce much ad revenue for the foreseeable future.

By 2010, Screen Digest projects, 55 percent of all video content consumed online will be generated by end users, representing about 44 billion streams. Despite that, amateur content will account for only about 15 percent of revenues derived from online video. Whether that’s a little or a lot can be debated, given that close to zero percent of amateur video content is monetized in any meaningful way today; it’s almost all run of network banners at this point.

At any rate, the report’s authors note the usual problems of hyper-targeting ads against video content, the difficulty of assigning quality and appropriateness quotients to individual clips, and the conundrum that experimenting with ad models is somewhat at odds with the non-commercial caché sites like YouTube built up in their early days. (link to report)