Marketwatch’s Bambi Francisco writes on how big media productions just don’t seem to matter in the online world when it comes to video. 

The truth is that one day, in the next 6 months to, well 2 years tops, there will be a lot of great content from old media used online.  The reality though is that the migration of content online from TV has been slow because the offline content is not yet formatted for the Web.  Yes, everyone loves 24, but when packaged for a one-hour show on TV.  Furthermore, the simple truth, as TheStreet.com’s Jim “Booyah” Cramer mentioned this week, is that the money is still offline, and not online.  Why would any sane media executive cannibalize his offline TV programming (and revenue) for the Web, where revenues are still largely a mirage.  Fact of the matter is that of that massive $12-20 billion figure many attribute to online advertising, most of it goes to Yahoo!, Google and others in search primarily (I own shares of Yahoo!).

Which begs the question, as growth of branded advertising accelerates, why isn’t old media pushing content online as to benefit from the upcoming boom in online advertising?

A lot of it has to do with internal turf battles, which we have covered plenty.  In a nutshell, within the boardroom of a Walt Disney for example, some people will want to protect content and keep it on ABC only, cause that’s where advertisers are spending billions.  They would argue: “why put it online, when, despite the growth in audiences and revenue, the absolute figures do not justify the migration online?”

But these days, at least in the past 6-12 months, it goes beyond that.  As always, Bambi does a fantastic job offering some great stats and data. 

Consider one piece of data from comScore shows that in January, Microsoft’s MSN Video was the No. 1 video site ranked by unique visitors, followed by Video@AOL, YouTube and then Google Video. According to comScore, MSN Video had 14.9 million unique visitors in January 2006, or 5 times more than YouTube, with 2.7 million visitors.

Yet over at Nielsen//NetRatings, YouTube’s audience figures were nearly twice as high, and MSN Video was doing worse. YouTube had 4.9 million unique visitors in January while MSN Video had 9.6 million, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

Some are keeping it low tech and low cost and simply creating stuff out of their basement.  The same way that many technology firms started in the basement, there is no reason to think that some of the creative brainiacs will not make it “big.”  Others are taking a more sophisticated approach, like HipMojo.com’s sister media property WatchMojo.com.

In the past 6 months, we’ve pumped out thousands of clips while some large corporations with millions in budgets have planned and strategized about what to do with online video. 

But, don’t kid yourself.  The old media firms know one thing: they can catch up to a new site like WatchMojo.com fairly easily if they wanted to, but even then, they cannot get away with doing entertainment, comedy mashups like this.  And when they do something more sophisticated like this, they might prefer to keep that on TV, cause that’s where the revenues are (notice that that is my definition of more sophisticated). 

The old media firms have learned that online, having a first mover advantage is important but it is not critical.  Yes, I said that.  The cliche is that you need to be the first to scale.  But even then, that’s not necessarily true.  Yahoo! was first in search, Google surpassed it.  Friendster was the first to scale (at least sufficiently), but MySpace surpassed it.  What old media has learned is that patience is indeed a virtue and no matter what the Nielsen NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix say, online video is still something on the fringe that has yet to go fully mainstream.  And that, my friends, is why advertising for video is still tiny and only by 2009 will video advertising cross the $1 billion mark.

The point is, there are way too many factors that give an edge to the little guy today, but overnight, the little guys (at least the smart little guys) know that the big, old media companies can enter this space and dominate at will.  But, the same way that innovation works best out of new, flexible and lean organizations, online video is naturally going to grow first out of someone’s basement, or in our case, on the 4th floor…

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