Online Video’s Rapid Growth Hits a Speed Bump [STATS]
comScore just posted its monthly report on online video viewership, and the total number of videos viewed in January slipped slightly as compared with December.
In December, 179 million people watched 33.2 billion videos. In January, it was 173 million people and 32.4 billion videos. It’s not a big decline, and we already saw in one of our monthly top webisode round-ups that special holiday content can boost viewership during December, so we know that this probably isn’t indicative of a downward trend.
In fact, the larger trend is very much up. YouTube
— by far the web video viewership leader — had users watching an average of 93 videos in January. That’s 50% more than a year ago, even though it’s almost a 4% decline since December.
YouTube still dominates, though. “Google Sites” (mostly YouTube) accounted for 39.5% of web video views in January. The nearest competitor was Hulu
with just 2.8%, followed by Microsoft sites with 1.5% andYahoo
sites with 1.3%.
The narrative we’re hearing here is that we’ve settled into something of a groove. There’s an upward trend, but the numbers are still dominated by almost exactly the same outlets. Are there any startups you believe will upset these stats in the future or is this going to be the lay of the land for the foreseeable future?
John Ayers 