Watch It: Online Video Tiny But Growing

Although Internet video is still a tiny fraction of all video consumed -- somewhere around 2%, according to recent estimates -- activity still grows at a healthy double-digit percentage clip.

For last month, The Nielsen Co. says total online video streams grew 24.8% in September versus the same time period a year ago, to 11.02 billion streams. The time spent by viewers during the month was at 195.2 minutes, up the same 24.8% versus September 2008.

Both those measures, however, were down versus August's data: 3% in total streams and off 4.7% in the time per viewer per month.

Unique monthly September viewers also climbed year-to-year -- up 12.3% to 139.3 million. The number of streams per viewer also was up 11% to 79.1 average streams per month.

YouTube still commands over 50% of all video streams online in the U.S. -- totaling 6.7 billion -- and more than 76% of all unique viewers in the U.S. with 106 million.

Hulu.com is far back in second place -- with 437.4 million streams and 13.5 million users. Yahoo has a little more than half the number of streams of Hulu -- 228.5 million -- but over twice the unique monthly visitors, at 30.1 million.

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Behind Hulu and Yahoo is MSN/WindowsLive/Bing and Fox Interactive Media. MSN has 180.1 million streams and 18.1 million uniques; Fox has 139.6 million streams and 14.3 million uniques.

Social-media company Facebook comes in 10th place overall in the number of streams -- at 110.4 million -- but is in third place for unique viewers of video, at 23.1 million.

Top Online Brands ranked by Video Streams for September 2009 (U.S.)

RANK

Video Brand

Total Streams (000)

Unique Viewers (000)

1

YouTube

6,688,367

106,180

2

Hulu

437,407

13,519

3

Yahoo!

228,494

30,084

4

MSN/WindowsLive/Bing

180,104

18,109

5

Fox Interactive Media

139,634

14,342

6

Nickelodeon Kids and Family Network

127,654

5,303

7

Turner Sports and Entertainment Digital Network

123,665

6,062

8

MTV Networks Music

116,839

9,647

9

ESPN Digital Network

114,652

9,299

10

Facebook

110,418

23,161

Source: The Nielsen Company

1 comment about "Watch It: Online Video Tiny But Growing".
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  1. Erika Spence from The Hive Advertising, October 14, 2009 at 9:21 a.m.

    Thanks for providing the report that online video watching numbers are growing, but please, Wayne, can you post a more mainstream photo to accompany it? That you selected something that is so obviously porn has two major problems with it: 1) it's sexist and may be offensive to some of your MDN readers, and 2) it underscores the perception of reluctant clients that porn is all people watch online, a perception that continues to be detrimental to our industry's efforts to persuade them to purchase video ads on "regular" sites.

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