Online video interest remains strong

January 4th, 2012

It’s clear that online video is becoming an increasingly popular section of the internet among users, but recent statistics have confirmed just how much time people are spending watching online videos.

The latest data, compiled by Nielsen, found that average US viewers watched more than five hours of online video during the month of November 2011.

This totalled around 22 billion videos over the course of the month, from 166.9 million unique video watchers.

While content on individual websites is receiving more and more attention, the main online video collection sites of course accounted for the majority of people’s viewing time. Of these, YouTube came out on top with 130.8 million unique viewers, followed by VEVO, which had 42.8 million.

However, Yahoo! and even the social network Facebook were shown to be climbing the ranks, with 34.4 million unique viewers and 30.3 million viewers respectively.

But when the sites were ranked in terms of time spent on the site by viewers, the charts changed somewhat. YouTube slipped to fourth place with an average viewing time of just three hours and seven minutes spent on the site over the course of the month.

Netflix, which stocks films and television programmes rather than shorter clips, topped this chart with a total average viewing time of ten hours 43 minutes totted up by users in November. This put it way in the lead, with second place Hulu only totalling an average user time of three hours and 11 minutes.

The data suggests a continued interest among users in online video, and, while it may be that they are spending more time watching longer content, they are more likely to visit providers of short content more often.