Hard as it is to believe, even a space as volatile as online video watching can become somewhat staid--at least statistics-wise.
Data from the comScore Video Metrix service showed more than 180 million U.S. Internet watchers (180,373 to be exact) were online looking at about 33 billion online videos during June. Apparently, Americans found other things to do besides sitting online watching videos because the June numbers were down from May's peak of 180,503 viewers and 35.556 billion online videos.
Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) sites was again the leader with more than 154.5 million unique viewers, followed by Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) sites (51.4 million), Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) (49 million), VEVO (46.2 million) and Viacom (NYSE: VIA) Digital (38.9 million). It will be interesting to see where Viacom sits in the next metrix after it finagled its site in a programming dispute with DirecTV.
More important, perhaps than the slight dip in total viewers and videos was what people were watching when they went online.
"Online video advertising had another record-breaking month in June with 11 billion total video ad streams," comScore reported. Google sites (of course) led the way with 1.41 billion video ads followed closely by BrightRoll Video Network (1.39 billion), Hulu (1.33 billion), Adap.tv (1.15 billion) and TubeVideo Ad Platform (1.04 billion).
As a change of pace, BrightRoll took over-the-top spot for delivering the highest duration of video ads--805 million minutes--and Hulu topped the highest frequency of video ads with an average of 52. ESPN pushed out an average of 34 ads per viewer. All totaled, video ads reached 53 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 68 times during the month, the research report said.
comScore also called out "other notable findings" that included 84.8 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video during the month and the average online content video was 6.8 minutes. The average online video ad consumed only 0.4 minutes, the firm said.
For more:
- see the comScore release
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