11.14.2007

Online Video Views Surpassing Expectations

I've been doing some research the last few days around online video usage by Americans. Earlier this year I came across these online video stats:

January 2007 Report: U.S. Online Video Viewers
(sources: eMarketer; U.S. Census Bureau)

  • 2003 – 52 million (32% of U.S. Internet users; 19% of population)
  • 2004 – 69 million (41% of U.S. Internet users; 25% of population)
  • 2005 – 89 million (51% of U.S. Internet users; 32% of population)
  • 2006 – 107 million (60% of U.S. Internet users; 38% of population)
  • 2007 projection – 123 million (67% of U.S. Internet users; 43% of population)
  • 2008 projection – 137 million (73% of U.S. Internet users; 47% of population)
Today I found these stats which show that by July of this year the actual American online video usage was far surpassing the late 2006 projections. In fact, the ComScore stats below show the actual online video views surpassing even the 2008 projections above....

July 2007 Report: U.S. Online Video Views
(source: ComScore)
Nearly 75% of U.S. Internet users watched an average of three hours of online video during the month. More than 9 billion videos were viewed by online during July, 2007. 2.4 billion of the video views occurred at YouTube.com. Yahoo! sites ranked second with 390 million, followed by Fox Interactive Media with 298 million, and Viacom Digital with 281 million.

What's the takeaway here? If you thought online video was a fad or even a slow trend it's actually quite the opposite. Besides, you know when she's jumping on board it's full-fledged mainstream.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

...and you can expect these trends to continue with new vigor with the present movie/tv script writers strike currently underway (notice all the late-night reruns?). The timing of the industry strike in these times strikes me as very poor timing and I expect the popularity of internet video to explode even more and shift more and more viewers away from network tv programming...

Bill Seaver said...

I agree Jon. The writer's strike is going to be a bigger blow to them than the expect I believe.