Advertisers must quickly move their money to online video to catch up with consumer demand – but publishers must give them reasons to, too, says the CEO of AOL’s Huffington Post Media Group, signalling a commitment to up its own game in the space.
“The dollars are not flowing right now – there’s a gap,” Jimmy Maymann tells Beet.TV, in this video interview. “There’s not enough advertising dollars invested in video at this point in time. There are more eyeballs than there is ad revenue.
“Over time, that gap has to be closed – otherwise, you’re not investing your advertisers’ money in the best possible way. I get disappointed when I see a 30-second pre-roll in front of a 30-second video. Video is still young. I have high hopes.”
Maymann declares Huffington Post will do its own bit over the next year, with an ambitious target to increase its video commitments.
“Our video views are around 10 to 15% of our views. We want that over the next year to shift to 50%. We want 50% of our views to come from text-based content and 50% from video.
“That’s basically tripling our video inventory – which means we need to produce a lot more video. We’re not producing at all the amount of video we need.
“On Huffington Post, you’re going to see a lot of new formats, new shows and new ways of making video interesting.”
This video is part of a series titled The State Of Video, a series sponsored by AOL Platforms. Please visit this page for all the videos from the series. This session was recorded in London.