New data from comScore’s Video Metrix service reveals that 178 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in June 2011, with an average of 16.8 hours per viewer. An impressive 85.6% of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video during the course of the month. U.S. internet users engaged in an all-time high of over 6 billion viewing sessions in June, and viewed over 5 billion online video ads.
The comScore data ranked the top 10 Video Content Properties by Unique Viewers:
- Google Sites ranked as the top online video content property in June with 149.3 million unique viewers (driven by YouTube.com), and also had the highest number of viewing sessions – over 2 billion – and most time spent per viewer – 5.4 hours
- VEVO had 63 million viewers
- Yahoo! Sites had 52.7 million viewers
- Microsoft Sites had 50.7 million viewers
- Viacom Digital ranked fifth with 49.5 million viewers
Video ads reached nearly half (49%) of the total U.S. population an average of 35.6 times during the month. Online video ads account for 13.6% of all videos viewed and 1.3% of all minutes spent viewing video online. The duration of the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes (compare to online content videos, with an average duration of 5.4 minutes).
Online video ad properties were also ranked, with Hulu receiving the highest number of video ad impressions, at over 1 billion, and also delivering the highest frequency of video ads to viewers, an average of 38.8.
More than 2 billion minutes were spent watching videos ads in June, with Tremor Media Video Network generating the highest duration of video ads – 429 million minutes.
TechCrunch notes that while YouTube previously stated the site handles 3 billion views per day, they were presumably counting individual video views. comScore’s measurement of viewing sessions is different, defined as “a period of time with continuous video viewing followed by a 30-minute period of video inactivity.”
