- Mike Shields

NEW YORK The audience for online video reached new heights last month, as over 158 million Americans streamed a total of 21.4 billion videos in July according to comScore -- both new records for the medium.

While online video consumption has been on the rise for a while, a little more than a year ago the total audience for Web video appeared to be leveling off. But since April of last year, nearly 24 million more users have become regular online video watchers, according to comScore’s data.

Since then, online video viewing has become even more mainstream; in July 2009, 81.0 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video, up from 73 percent in April '08. The average viewer streamed 8.3 hours of video content last month. Indeed, it seems that July, a month during which summer vacations would theoretically cut into streaming (at least at work) has been particularly strong for movie trailers and music clips, such as the work of the recently-deceased Michael Jackson.

Not surprisingly, Google sites, which include YouTube, dominated the video category, accounting for 42 percent of all streams during the month (8.9 billion videos overall). Viacom Digital placed a distant second with 812 million streams, or 3.8 percent of the market.

In terms of unique users, Google also dominated, reaching 121 million unique viewers, vs. 64.5 million uniques for second-place Microsoft. Fast-growing Hulu reached 38.1 million unique users, good enough for sixth place. To put Google’s dominance in perspective, YouTube’s audience averaged 74.1 videos per viewer vs. 12 videos per viewer for Hulu’s audience.

However, to Hulu’s credit, while the average online video consumed during the month was 3.7 minutes, Hulu viewers on average watched 1 hour and 13 minutes of video content on the site.


Nielsen Business Media