The Watershed Moment

Mark Andreesen’s attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, when the internet was in its infancy -- Larry Page’s meeting up with Sergey Brin at Stanford University -- Steve Jobs’ firing from Apple...These were all seemingly ordinary events that later served as watershed moments in the evolution and commercial viability of new technologies.

Earlier this week, Google and Freewheel announced that they will be working together to open up monetization opportunities on YouTube. With this announcement, YouTube is giving marketers access to one of the biggest audiences online. To-date, the ad agencies have turned a blind eye to online video because it's been very difficult to amass a large audience. (And for the overworked media planners and buyers, making it easier to find a lot of eyeballs, matters.) As a result, they have rarely created versions of their ads for online video distribution. This reality is apparent on Hulu. Hulu's content garners fill rates between 50% and 70%. With YouTube's inventory opening up, media buyers will now have an alternative to TV media buys. This is a change that will benefit the entire video industry. More VAST compliant ads will accelerate the migration of high quality content to the Web, create a need for video ecosystem technologies and jumpstart the advertising market. Estimates for Q4 online video advertising revenues range from $200M to $300M - my guess, given this recent development, is that we'll be closer to $500M.

This is a very exciting time for our industry.