to blossom in coming months
Study predicts rise to $1.8B from $1.1B in 1999
By Jeremy Schlosberg
Those waiting for the internet to come into its own as an entertainment medium won’t have to wait much longer.
By the end of this year, the online entertainment market will grow to $1.8 billion, compared to $1.1 billion in 1999, a 64 percent increase.
And also by the end of this year, more than 90 percent of all internet users will have watched some kind of entertainment on the web, compared to roughly 75 percent who have done so as of now.
These numbers come from a new survey done jointly by Gemini Consulting and Honkworm International.
The type of online entertainment the survey refers to excludes games, web TV and adult entertainment. The survey refers to the remaining entertainment as "webisodes," a name which if the industry is fortunate will not catch on.
Of internet users who have tuned into these so-called webisodes, only 29 percent did so purposefully—that is, knowing about something ahead of time and actively seeking it. By contrast, 64 percent of those who have sampled online entertainment programming to date say they’ve stumbled upon it while surfing for some other reason.
This suggests to the report’s authors that the market for such entertainment is highly fragmented and immature. The authors also draw the conclusion that this is ready to change this year but do not cite numbers to back this assertion.
Those who have watched some sort of online entertainment program are not exactly couch potatoes. About 60 percent of such viewers tune in for merely one to three minutes. Only one in five watch such programming for more than three minutes.
This suggests that online entertainment is going to find different forms than TV-style entertainment, according to the report’s authors.
Almost 90 percent of all who have viewed online entertainment do so from their homes, while fewer than 8 percent plug in from the office. Still, the report suggests that the office represents the fastest-growing segment of the online entertainment market. Just don’t tell the employers.
Gemini Consulting is a management consulting subsidiary of the Cap Gemini Group, an international information technology services company. Honkworm International is a company that creates original online programming.
-Jeremy Schlosberg is the senior editor for new media.