Online Video Viewing Up, says comScore
My stock portfolio convinces me regularly that I have a very limited ability to predict the future. But two fresh news stories suggest that I may have gotten at least one thing right when I talked about online video.
Consumption is up by a healthy 18 percent in the six months from October 2005 to March 2006, according to comScore. And — surprisingly, perhaps — the usage (though not the amount) is about evenly split between men and women.
Add to that statistic another, perhaps even more astounding: 3.7 billion streams were viewed, at an average of 100 minutes per month. (Though males, unsurprisingly, watch more at nearly two hours per month compared to females at one hour twenty minutes.)
Taking the smaller figure as discounting porn, even at an hour per month — with the growth of and low resistance to video ads — that’s equal to the average time spent on search.
As reported by Zachary Rodgers on ClickZ:
“But while certain demographic sets consume more video than others, the report’s biggest surprise is that people from all ages and walks of life are eating it up, according to Erin Hunter, comsCore’s EVP of media and entertainment.
‘There are skews by age, but there isn’t any group that’s not doing it,” she said. “It’s not just college kids. It’s also the older demographic, and clearly it’s males and females both. In terms of content, we see entertainment and sports and news all with pretty strong rates of viewership.’”
Interestingly, the market share percentages — though not the companies nor their order — for providing that video break down along lines similar to search. YouTube is at 43%, MySpace at 24%, Yahoo! At 9,58%, and MSN 9.21%, with Google trailing at 6.48%. (Source: Jason Lee Miller at WebProNews.)
Add to those facts another story that shows Napster’s music increase in sales at 104% and I begin to look downright psychic — which I definitely ain’t. Or so my broker tells me.