Traffic analysts estimate 5 billion US video views in July for YouTube alone.
Comscore issued their report for July website traffic in the online video sector today and two numbers really stand out. The company estimates that US web users viewed more than 5 billion videos that month and says that 75 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in July. Those are some pretty high numbers, but 3rd party traffic stats always have to be taken with a giant grain of salt. Do you believe that online video is this universal yet?
Interesting stats from the Comscore study include:
- The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.
- 91 million viewers watched 5 billion videos on YouTube.com (54.8 videos per viewer).
- 51.4 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (7.8 videos per viewer).
- The duration of the average online video was 2.9 minutes.
How good are these numbers from Comscore? It’s hard to know. The company is widely respected, but so is Hitwise, another traffic analyst firm that comes up with very different numbers. See our write up in June of a Hitwise report that argued that the video market in general was declining but that YouTube had a 75% marketshare in May. Comscore reports that YouTube has a 44% marketshare. Both companies agree on who the leaders are, perhaps Comscore is just looking further out the long tail in who it includes in the category.
All of these numbers are subject to interpretation and no one’s data collection method is anywhere near perfect. Do you believe the assertion that 75% of the US market online watched online video in July? We regularly talk to people who don’t know the first thing about anything regarding the internet, but perhaps even they spend time on YouTube or use Windows Media Player to watch news video on the big news portals.
Let us know your take on the believability of these numbers in the poll above. For more details, see Comscore’s full report.
