YouTube is king, retail media ad spend, and streaming vs cable

Two things Justin Bieber must be eternally grateful for are having an incredibly supportive mother and YouTube. It was in 2007 when Bieber’s mother, Pattie, started putting up videos of the then 12-year-old singing sensation on The Tube for ‘friends and family to see.’ Within a few months, he was “Ushered” into global stardom and the rest, as they say, is history.

YouTube has launched many stars on its platform over the years. Voiro has its own special connection with the social media platform. Kavita Shenoy, our CEO, worked for several years at YouTube and, in the early years of Voiro, along with co-founder Anand Gopal, spent a lot of time trying to figure out how creators can get the most out of YouTube.

As Voiro turns 8 and YouTube turns 17, we take a deep dive into the evolution of YouTube in terms of technology and content.

We also take a look at what the future looks like for retail media ad spend and VCs’ growing interest in non-US ad tech markets. Read on.

The Deep Dive

AdTech

YouTube: In a League Of Its Own

Summary

Audience measurement company Nielsen recently launched its Four-Screen Ad Deduplication methodology for YouTube. The report said, “YouTube accounts for over 50% of ad-supported streaming watch time on connected TVs among people over 18 in the U.S.” With this methodology, media buyers can “compare YouTube reach to linear TV.” What’s more, YouTube is very close to catching up with streaming giant Netflix.

The Voiro View:

YouTube, even today, is the king of long-form content. They are in a league of their own in every metric. If you are a creator focused on long-form content, you must be on YouTube. Many creators think of YouTube as their home, and it’s the second largest search engine after Google. Today, you’re not going to TikTok to look up a video if something happens. 

Even with the younger generation going to TikTok and Instagram for short-form videos, according to a report by Nielsen, 95% of 18 to 20-year-old Americans are on YouTube. 50% of ad-supported video is from YouTube. The report also talked about how YouTube is catching up with Netflix in the United States, where Netflix is at 8% of streaming minutes, but YouTube is at 7.3%. It’s a no-brainer for anybody to put their money behind YouTube. The truth is YouTube is one of the only businesses that can offer other businesses outcomes at scale. Every big company has a YouTube channel and the numbers speak for themselves. In addition to that, YouTube has always had very robust technology. They were able to support various kinds of game events and deliver content at very high quality.

Today, YouTube is building features similar to Twitch to enable commerce. They’re a company that’s still heavily vertically integrated. Besides having a solid foundation, they also continue to be a very innovative company. YouTube is a combination of many stories. There’s a tech story, a retail story, and an acquisition story. This is a product that stays socially relevant through constant innovation.

Weekend in Review

Future of Retail Media Network: Bigger and Brighter

Summary

eMarketer released a report on Retail Media Ad Spending Forecast for 2022 in which it said that retail media, the second-fastest-growing ad category in the US, is now looking at opportunities to tap into the video and CTV markets. According to the report, “US digital retail media ad spending will reach $61.15 billion by the end of the forecast period in 2024. This is nearly triple the 2020 figure of $20.81 billion and represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30.9% in that four-year span.”

The Voiro View

With the pandemic, which this report calls a ‘perfect storm for retail media,’ people had to go to the retail media networks to shop. Everybody adopted this concept overnight and now they are hooked. There was this saying earlier that ‘every company is a data company’. Then we said, ‘every company is a media company’. Now it seems like ‘every company is a ‘media network.’’  And the future of the retail media market is only going to become bigger and brighter.

AdTech

VC Interest in Non-US Ad Tech Markets

Summary

The FirstPartyCapital (FPC) newsletter talks about ‘5 billion reasons to invest in European MadTech.’  The interesting read lists several European companies over $100 million or higher that have exited the US ad tech market in the last year. This is a narrative that the FPC has been reiterating for the past few months. It says, “This industry is right at the start of a new innovation cycle that will cause a huge amount of disruption. There will never be a better time to invest, as legacy ad tech falls asunder.”

The Voiro View

The definition of an ad itself has changed over time. Marketers may not drop their ad spend whenever there is turbulence in the economy, but they will look to get a lot more out of their spending. This means they will look for ways to bet on ads that are more performant. Factors like measurement, attribution, and contextual advertising are coming into play. Advertising today is breaking away from traditional search engine optimisation and moving towards innovating around context-based advertising. So, it’s an interesting development that will throw up a lot of learnings along the way.