April was another record-breaking month for online video ads, which represented 1 in 5 videos watched online during the month in the U.S. Out of nearly 37 billion online video views in April by 181 million U.S. internet users, 9.5 billion were video ads, according to new data released by comScore’s Video Metrix service.
An impressive 84.5% of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video. Where are most of these internet users watching video? Google sites – led by YouTube.com – ranked first with 157.7 million unique viewers, well above the competition. Other top properties included Yahoo! sites with 53.6 million viewers, and Facebook.com with 44.3 million. Out of the 37 billion video views in April 2012, Google sites were responsible for 17 billion.
How do the number of viewers and the time spent watching videos online compare to last year? While the number of unique viewers rose just 5% since April 2011, total minutes spent watching online video increased 46% year-over-year, to an average of 1,307. Time spent watching video on Google channels increased 55% since April 2011, and time spent watching video on Yahoo! channels nearly doubled in the same period, according to PaidContent.
The average U.S. online video viewer watched 21.8 hours of online video content in April 2012.
And most important for marketers – how much of that video content included ads, and how many viewers did those ads reach? Online video ads reached the majority (52%) of the total U.S. population an average of 60 times during the month. Video ads accounted for 20.5% of all videos viewed and 1.6% of all minutes spent viewing video online. The duration of the average online content video was 6.4 minutes; the average online video ad was just 0.4 minutes. In total, time spent watching video ads reached 3.9 billion minutes.
In short, while the number of viewers has not increased dramatically, those viewers are spending much more time watching videos online – and viewing a significant number of video ads in the process.
