Marketing Pilgrim

Of course everyone knows that Americans watch a lot of video. Why not, right? We spend a lot of time online and we like to make excuses to not exercise. It’s the perfect storm for YouTube and Hulu and the rest of the video distribution sites of the world. It is somewhat amazing though to see the numbers attached to it, though. comScore reports, in fact, that in July US Internet users watched a staggering 21.4 billion videos. That’s a new record, by the way. I feel like Frank Barone from the Everybody Loves Raymond show because all I can say to that is – “Holy crap!”

In July, Google Sites continued to rank as the top U.S. video property with a record 8.9 billion videos viewed, making up 42 percent of all videos viewed online. YouTube.com accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed at the property. Viacom Digital ranked second with 812 million (3.8 percent) followed by Microsoft Sites with 631 million videos viewed (3.0 percent).

So Google leads the pack (yawn!) but Hulu reached an all time high with 454 million video views. Not bad. As for number of viewers Google logged 121 million viewers who averaged 74 videos a month.

Other notable findings from July 2009 include:

• The top video ad networks in terms of their actual delivered reach were: Tremor Video Network (20.1 percent viewer penetration), Brightroll Video Network (17.4 percent), and BroadbandEnterprises.com (14.4 percent).
• 81.0 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 500 minutes of video, or 8.3 hours.
• 120.3 million viewers watched 8.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (74.1 videos per viewer).
• 48.2 million viewers watched 518.6 million videos on MySpace.com (10.8 videos per viewer).
• The average Hulu viewer watched 12.0 videos, totaling 1 hour and 13 minutes of videos per viewer.
• The duration of the average online video was 3.7 minutes.

I still marvel at the amount of video content consumed. My question is what percentage of it is stupid human tricks and the online version of the last words of every redneck, “Hey y’all watch this!”?