Workers feast on lunch webcasts

In cubicles across the country, lunchtime has become the new prime time, as workers click aside their spreadsheets to watch videos on YouTube, news highlights on CNN.com or other Web offerings.

The trend — part of a broader phenomenon known as video snacking — is turning into a growth business for news and media companies, which are feeding the lunch crowd more fresh content.

In some offices, workers coordinate their midday Web-watching schedules, the better to shout out punch lines to one another across rows of desks. Some people gravitate to sites where they can reliably find webcasts of a certain length — say, a three-minute political wrap-up — to minimize their mouse clicks and the sandwich crumbs that wind up in the keyboard.

The midday spike in Web traffic is not new, but media companies have started responding in a meaningful way in the past year. They are creating new shows, timing the posts to coincide with hunger pangs. They also are rejiggering the way they sell advertising online, recognizing that noontime programs can command a premium.

In 2007, a growing number of local television stations, including WNCN in Raleigh, N.C., and WCMH in Columbus, Ohio, began producing noon programming exclusively for the Web. Among newspapers, The Virginian-Pilot of Hampton Roads, Va., and The Ventura County Star in California started posting videos at lunchtime that are hosted by young journalists and meant to appeal to 18- to 34-year-old audiences.

The trend has caught on with large and small independent sites. Yahoo's daily best-of-the-Web segment, called "The 9" and sponsored by Pepsi, is produced day in time for lunch. At MyDamnChannel.com, a showcase for offbeat videos, programmers have been instructed to promote new videos around noon on the East Coast, when the two-hour traffic spike starts.

"Based on the traffic I'm seeing," said Miguel Monteverde, executive director of AOL Video, "our nation's productivity is in question."

From an apartment in New York's Greenwich Village, Rob Millis and Will Coghlan host and produce a three-minute daily webcast, Political Lunch, by about 10 a.m., spend an hour and a half editing it, and upload it just before noon. Political Lunch, which was introduced in September and appears on several Web sites, is viewed 10,000 to 20,000 times a week, with a peak in traffic from 1 to 3 p.m.

"It's an Internet version of appointment viewing," Millis said.

One man who takes his midday video schedule seriously is Jason Spitz, a merchandise manager for a major record label in Los Angeles. He trades links to short videos with his friends throughout the day — usually low-budget sketch-comedy bits from FunnyOrDie.com or CollegeHumor.com — and stockpiles them to watch during lunch breaks. He and his colleagues like to look at the same videos at the same time from their separate desks, turning the routine into a communal activity.

"The clips are shorter than a full 30-minute TV show, so we can cram several small bites of entertainment into one lunch break," Spitz said. "The funniest moments usually become inside jokes among my co-workers."

Noah Lehmann-Haupt, founder of an upscale car-rental company in New York, said video snacking on short clips is "a good excuse to stay at my desk during lunch, which I prefer since it keeps the momentum of the day going." He often watches segments from "The Daily Show" now that Comedy Central has put eight years' worth of episodes online for free viewing.

Plus, the format leaves both hands free to consume the day's takeout meal. "I can't exactly surf while eating, and it's healthy to step away from e-mails and work for a few minutes a day," he said.

Some content plays better over lunch. CNN.com, which draws an average of 69 million video plays each month, tends to promote lighter videos in the middle of the day. ("Cloned cats glow in the dark" and "Bulldog straps on skateboard" were among the most popular on a recent weekday.)

At NBC.com and other network Web sites, shorter videos draw more lunchtime traffic than longer ones, which get downloaded more often at night. For that reason, sites such as NBC.com emphasize short-form highlights during the day and half-hour or hourlong shows in the evening.

From an advertiser's perspective, the Web is a more flexible medium than television, because technology makes it easy to monitor people's behavior and adjust programming accordingly.

Better still, marketers have found that consumers are up to 30 percent more likely to make a purchase after viewing an advertisement at lunchtime than at other times of the day.

"Not only is advertising volume and Internet use increasing during the 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. time period, but people are actually buying and purchasing and reacting to advertising," said Young-Bean Song, vice president of analytics for Atlas Solutions, a unit of Microsoft that helps companies with digital-marketing campaigns.

Sticking to a schedule turns out to be almost as important on the Web as it is on television. At blip.TV, a video-sharing site, Mike Hudack, the chief executive, encourages his producers to post videos at the same time each day or week.

"Continuity and consistency is incredibly important," Hudack said. "If you want to attract a loyal audience, you have to give them what they expect when they expect it."