Mele’s Musings

Online Video Viewing Still Rising

83 videos PER USER watched during March.  I think we can safely say that people will watch video online.  But what kind of video?

picture: Google Images

Article excerpt:  But how much? Internet users in the US watched 11.5 billion online videos in March 2008, up 13% over February 2008 and 64% over March 2007, according to comScore Video Metrix. That is an average of 83 videos watched per viewer during March.  Online video viewing is a mainstream activity for Internet users in the US. Nearly three-quarters of the online population watched an online video in March.  Nearly 85 million viewers watched 4.3 billion videos on YouTube (50.4 videos per viewer), while over 47 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace (8.4 videos per viewer). Including YouTube, Google sites served an average of 50.9 videos per viewer.
the rest: emarketer.com

Musing:  So, people are watching a lot of video online, but they are watching in little bites – the average video viewed was 2.8 minutes long.  Averages don’t mean much when dealing with huge numbers like 11.5 billion videos, but it clearly indicates that it is not long-form video that is being watched primarily.  This means that adding ads to videos will be challenging.  Is a user really going to watch a 30 second spot to then watch a 160 second video?  How we can effectively communicate with users online with video is still being figured out, but it seems to me to point toward content creation over ad creation for how we reach out to consumers.  Can we shift our mentality about what is video marketing?