Video is hot, but magazines making money from it? That's something else

The magazine industry, according to Time Inc. Studios president Paul Speaker, has the "most underleveraged storytellers on the planet".

“There is no other platform, no other train coming,” Speaker told the Magazine Publishers of America digital video conference (reported by Folio:). He said “brand permission,” a term publishers wary of putting resources into video sometimes employ, is “a rearview mirror term—your audience is consuming more and more video every day.”

While Speaker said magazines were relatively slow off the mark, other panellists said monetization of web video is elusive. David Hallerman, a senior analyst at eMarketer, said spending on online video advertising in 2007 was $925 million, a tiny percentage of the $25.9 billion spent on all online advertising. However, he said it is the biggest growth area and could reach $5.5 billion by 2012.

“For a lot of marketers, video is seen as experimental,” Hallerman said, noting that the top 100 advertisers spent just 3.1 percent of their total advertising budgets online. “Video may not always something you’ll directly make money from, but will help increase traffic and brand awareness.”

One problem, Hallerman said, was that one in three people say online video ads are annoying, and there is a steep drop-0ff in viewing of longer forms.

Even big, well-financed companies are finding online video and online video ads a challenge. An executive with CondéNet, Richard Glosser, said that video initiatives were harder to implement than they at first seemed. Last year, he said, the company concentrated on "putting in the plumbing" necessary to produce high-quality video. “This year, it’s about how to scale the business.”