The digital video viewing audience grew 20.3 percent in 2012, topping the 500 billion view mark (actually 511 billion views) across both professionally produced and user-generated content (UGC) spaces, according to AccuStream Research.
The statistics charted an ever-shifting online video space, including types of viewers and types of devices used to view the content and, as indicated earlier, even the types of video viewed. Professionally produced, hosted and managed video drew 104.4 billion views, up 17.9 percent over 2011, and UGC grabbed 408.8 billion views, up 21 percent year-over-year.
The professional sites garnered 13.2 percent of their views from smartphones, tablets and connected devices, while UGC, led by YouTube, had about a 22.2 percent mobile viewing rate.
"Whereas growth rates across digital video channels are synching as they converge, audience viewing patterns surrounding self-selected, personal preference programming also diverge," AccuStream Research said in a press release.
A relatively new but quickly growing category, TV Everywhere, grabbed 22.5 percent of the cumulative viewing share. In 2006, the share for this nascent business was only 8.3 percent.
Viewing behavior also differed based on content. Professional content audiences tended to click and lean back to watch longer program selections such as movie and television content, which accounted for 30 percent of total views in 2012. UGC viewers, meanwhile, took less time but watched more often--84.4 times per site per month per user, to be exact. This behavior has been ongoing, and the number of views there only increased 4.4 percent year-over-year.
Among the UGC crowd, "audience appetite for music, comedy and entertainment video is predominate, and consumption patterns stimulated by lean forward search, discovery, sharing, snacking and library grazing activity," the press release said.
For more:
- AccuStream issued this press release
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