Online Video Use Skyrocketing

Posted: February 10th, 2009 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Social Media News | No Comments

This news is about a week old, and can now be removed from the “things I’ve been meaning to blog about” file. According to comScore, December was a record-setting month for web video watching. Despite the election being over (and all of the great SNL election web videos on NBC going stale), December’s video watching was up 13% over November, for a record total of 14.3 billion videos watched. More details from Podcasting News…

YouTube led the Internet video portals, accounting for 49% of the incremental gain in December videos viewed versus the previous month.

In December, Google sites ranked as the top U.S. “video property,” with 5.9 billion videos viewed (41% online video market share), thanks to YouTube.com, which accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed at the property.

Fox Interactive Media ranked a distant second with 445 million videos (3.1%), followed closely by Yahoo! sites with 330 million (2.3%) and Viacom Digital with 291 million (2.0%).

Hulu continued its growth trajectory, climbing 6 percent over its November viewing numbers, to 241 million videos viewed.

Despite ranking fifth among video properties for number of videos viewed in December, it should be noted that Hulu scored the longest average duration for individuals’ online video viewing, just over 10 minutes.

What does this mean? Well … it means that people are watching a lot of web videos. More significantly, it means web video watching is becoming mainstream. It’s still not a primary way to get video entertainment, but we’re not terribly far away from that day. And, if your business isn’t using social media like web video and podcasting, it should be.

Image courtesy The New York Times.