Making sense of the web's fast-growing but fragmented video audience isn't easy. But the truth may be that reach is already here. It's just up to the marketers to find it.
At some point in my life 8 p.m. stopped being all that important. When I was a kid, primetime defined my media world, and I can pretty much chart what I know about pop culture from the shows I watched, all of which aired in that three-hour block called primetime.
Sad to say, but when the clock struck 8 p.m., a near Pavlovian response took hold as I raced to the TV to find the shows that defined my generation.
But fragmentation has eviscerated that shared media environment, and the on-demand culture of the web has made time irrelevant.
Is this a bad thing? No. Consumers seem to love it. Media companies, though stunned by how niche their audiences have become, seem to be adapting, and marketers are turning to technology companies to give them the reach they came to expect in the days of network TV.
And so it appeared that everyone in the media triangle (consumers, content producers and marketers) was coping -- with varying degrees of success -- in an increasingly fragmented world. True, a handful dinosaurs masquerading as media executives still insisted on a primetime audience, but that idea -- that users would actually band together for a shared experience subject to the dictates of a clock -- seemed laughable at best.
But then something weird happened -- at least, if you believe a piece in The New York Times.
It turns out that the web hasn't killed primetime after all. But like so many things on the internet, it's not what you think.
For starters, the web's primetime (if there is one, more on that in a bit), is a midday event. What some refer to as dayparting and others call video snacking is actually a trend of students, office workers, housewives and possibly the perpetually unemployed turning away from the TV and embracing new media in a big way.
It's noon; do you know who's looking at your ads?
Speaking mostly to publishers, The New York Times found that there is a growing push to get content up in time for a midday audience.
"Go take a walk around your office [at lunchtime]," Alan Wurtzel, head of research for NBC told the paper. "Out of 20 people, I'm going to guarantee that five are going to be on some sort of site that is not work-related."
According to The New York Times, portals like AOL and Yahoo have taken note of the trend, gearing their content toward a noon audience.
For Rob Barnett, CEO of MyDamnChannel, there's little doubt that there's such a thing as a midday video spike.
"We've been able to prove that noon -- no matter what geographic region you're looking at -- is the new primetime," Barnett says. "Wherever you look, there's a significant spike around noon."
In fact, one of Barnett's shows, "Horrible People," has a decidedly soap opera quality to it on the theory that midday audiences may have shifted platforms but kept their taste in content pretty much the same.