Jeff Segal Director of Strategy Consulting, Magid Advisors

It’s no secret that the content monetization models of yore have had a tough run over the past decade. Newspaper print revenues are down 70% in that time period. The decline in home video sales is outpacing growth in digital options. CD sales dropped 30% between mid-2015 and 2013, and digital downloads fell 13% over that same span. Then there’s pay TV, which has lost nearly 900,000 net subscribers in 2015 alone.

Clearly, the Internet has fundamentally changed the way people think about paying for content. Particularly with video content,  there are some big success stories. Over The Top (OTT) video services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon have been able to monetize shifting consumer attitudes through lucrative subscription models. As a result, the OTT video market has been on a big growth path.

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We all know the Internet is big - some 3.5 trillion web pages big, by the latest comScore estimates. But you wouldn't know it by looking at the current state of the online video market.

Nearly a decade after advertisers started batting around the idea of the Internet's "long tail," highly branded video publishers have yet to grasp the meaning of the phrase. The online video market is now pulling in over $6 billion. That's not bad. But with an injection of democracy, the market could grow to three times that size in very short order.

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