According to the latest Comscore report about the online video market, U.S. Internet users watched close to 13.5 billion videos online in October, which represents an increase of 45 percent compared to last year. Google’s YouTube alone served almost 5.4 billion videos to 99.5 million viewers.
However, according to a report by AdAge, there was some negative news for YouTube in these numbers as well: the site’s overall market share dropped almost 10% since July, as Hulu and other services are getting more attention from users than ever before.
Hulu
The overall market is still growing, and a lot of these viewers are heading to YouTube, but Hulu almost doubled its viewership from July to October. According to Comscore, Hulu’s users also watch relatively long videos, with an average of 11.6 minutes. Given the type of content on the site, that’s really no surprise, but no other top 10 video site gets even close to these numbers.
TV on YouTube
In many ways, this is probably just a sign of a maturing market, but it also shows that YouTube has to continue to improve its service, and that Google needs to continue to court professional content producers, as viewers are clearly also looking for this kind of content. The addition of the wide-screen format and HD videos is surely a step in this direction, but so far, we haven’t heard of any major TV networks signing up with YouTube to distribute full length shows, and the viewing experience on the site for longer videos still isn’t ideal.
