comScore: Online Video Viewing Continues To Rise
Admin March 9th, 2009
Is recession and financial fear pushing folks to stay at home and entertain themselves instead of splashing out on a movie and dinner date? Perhaps. Or maybe it’s the inclement weather. Whatever the reason, online video viewing continued to rise in January.
New figures released by comScore show that nearly 15 billion video viewing sessions took place in the first month of 2009, an average of around 500 million per day. No prizes for guessing which site catered to the most viewers. YouTube, the third most-visited website on the Internet, passed the 100 million viewers mark for the first time.
In terms of market share, Google Sites, which includes YouTube, was the most-visited U.S. video property with 6.4 billion videos viewed overall accounting for a 43% of the online video market. Next in line was Fox Interactive Media with 3.7% market share (552 million video views), followed by Yahoo with 2.5% (374 million views).
comScore’s data also showed a 4% increase in the number of video users in January, compared to December 2008, bringing the number to over three-quarters (76.8%) of the U.S. online population. comScore attributes 91% of this growth to YouTube alone.
Time spent watching videos also increased. The average Internet user watched approximately 6 hours of video in January, up 15% on December. Also up was the average duration of a watched video clip – up to 3.5 minutes from 3.2.
