Women jump the online video gap

Pew Internet‘s recent State of Online Video report didn’t generate a lot of buzz when it was released last month. And, fair enough, the fact that online video viewership has doubled since 2007 ain’t exactly front page news.

What I found interesting, though, were the numbers on online video creation.  There are some trends there that are potentially game-changing.

First: women have almost completely erased the gender gap when it comes to online video production.

In 2007, a mere 6 percent of women Internet users had uploaded video for other people to watch online versus 11 percent of men. Fast forward three years, though, and the picture is much different. According to Pew, now 14 percent of women Internet users are posting video online compared to 15 percent of men. It shouldn’t be long before the trend lines meet up.

The other interesting trend is that 30-49 year-olds of either sex are now almost as likely as 18-29s to post video online.

So what are the implications?

The social implications are huge, in the sense that we’re moving towards a culture where we’re just as engaged in creating content for each other as we are in consuming content created by a handful media giants. And we’re moving towards a climate where women’s voices are as prevalent as men’s. I think those are both powerful and positive developments.

Narrowing the focus to a marketing outlook, I think the most obvious implication is that marketers no longer need to focus only on the male 18-29 demographic when they’re design participatory, user-generated content campaigns. Companies from many different sectors now need to start looking to engage with their customers through participatory video.