With its most important audience congregating on online video sites, Hollywood is starting to take notice and use it as a new marketing opportunity.
One strategy being used is to simply put movie trailers up of soon to be released DVDs and then hope that the viewers virally pass them along to their friends; the basic practice of this particular audience.
With teens and young adults being the major drivers of the DVD market, a number of studios are putting on contests to attract the interests of this demographic.
Ken Graffeo, executive vice president of marketing at Universal Studios Home Entertainment said, "Because DVD consumers are increasingly getting their entertainment information online, Internet marketing has become an intrinsic component of all our DVD campaigns, the key is coming up with creative concepts that speak directly to a title's core audience."
Paramount has started to offer about three trailers a month at this time, to get a feel for what the audience wants. The main reason given that their target buyer prefers going online to search for DVD information also.
This trend isn't only being targeted to larger video-clip sites like YouTube or iFilm, but is increasingly growing and being introduced to niche providers also.
YouTube's streaming itself has grown to over 50 million video clips daily, and as a result of advertiser interest has birthed an entire industry of new video sites as 180 have been started in the last 90 days alone, and they're getting a lot of Web traffic.
YouTube as of this writing is the 39th most visited Web site according to Hitwise. This has gone up from April where they were at No. 75. YouTube claims that it receives 50,000 new video uploads daily.
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