4.5 Hours of Video Viewed Per User at Google, 5.4 Billion Video Ads in November

ComScore dropped their monthly Video Metrix on us the other day and I've just been so busy that I couldn't get to it until now. All that research I was doing myself was taking up some time. But here we are, just a couple weeks left in 2010 and online video is as powerful as ever with some 172 Million Americans dropping in to check something out last month online. This seems to be about the plateau for users since we haven't seen much higher numbers as highest ever for a month was around 183M back in May of this year. 

Again, the top spot goes to Google (meaning YouTube) in all categories, unique viewers, sessions and minutes per. Hulu is absent from the top ten this month and Yahoo! is in second place we a rather large 61.8M unique viewers. I wonder how the recent events at Yahoo! video will changes this over time. You've heard right? No more user uploads, deleting everything there in March? No? go read Jeremy's piece on that (that's the link FYI). VEVO took third with 50M unique viewers, a fine showing for them and three million more than AOL who was in fourth, just edging out Viacom who missed the mark by 400,000 viewers. Talk about a narrow margin! After that there are large (5 million viewers) drop offs to Facebook, Microsoft, FOX, NBCU and finally Turner.

In terms of time Google nabbed 4.5 hours per viewer and VEVO came in second with only a third of that. Viacom grabbed almost an hour of attention and after Microsoft, at 49 minutes, the totals are fairly low.
Top U.S. Online Video Properties by Video Content - November 2010

Views Ranked by Unique Viewers - Total U.S. Home/Work/University Locations
Property                           Total Unique    Viewing     Minutes
                                     Viewers      Sessions       per
                                      (000)          (000)     Viewer
Total Internet : Total Audience      172,343       5,190,734    884.6
Google Sites                         145,829       1,979,988    271.2
Yahoo! Sites                          61,803        241,208      26.4
VEVO                                  50,320        261,368      85.4
AOL, Inc.                             47,687        251,112      30.2
Viacom Digital                        47,282        146,570      55.2
Facebook.com                          42,500        131,209      15.9
Microsoft Sites                       35,348        144,422      49.9
Fox Interactive Media                 31,552        115,961      18.1
NBC Universal                         29,192         63,293      20.1
Turner Digital                        27,714         95,346      24.1

Video Advertising Network Performance for November 2010

Hulu, not even really a video ad network (VAN) took second spot showing more ads per viewer than all but CWTV who show an amazing 68.5 ads per viewer and have, in my opinion, the worst content to run those ads against. I'm guessing that it's all pimple creams and energy drinks considering the theme of most of their content. 68.5 ads per viewer and they only managed 200 million ads. That gives them only 2.9 million viewers.

Hulu on the other hand showed 42.4 per viewer and over 1.1 billion ads. That's about 27 million users, just shy of the top ten the first graph. In fact, Hulu's 42.4 ads per viewer is only 5.5 more than the average for the month, while CWTV is almost double! Probably why they only have about 3M viewers.

In terms of ads shown it goes Hulu (1.1B), Tremor Media (477M), Adap.tv (446M), Microsoft (427M) and then Brightroll rounding out the top 5 with 386M. Spots six through ten are just more than what Hulu showed, pretty impressive on their part.

comScore did note that CWTV's high number of ads per viewer is due to their policy of showing similar ad loads online as they do on TV. Video ads, overall, reached 49% of Americans in the month.

Top U.S. Online Video Properties by Video Ads* Viewed - November 2010

Ranked by Video Ads Viewed - Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Property                          Video Ads    Frequency    % Reach Total
                                     (000)     (Ads/viewer) U.S. Population
Total Internet : Total Audience    5,391,715      36.8          48.6%
Hulu                               1,150,651      42.4           9.0%
Tremor Media Video Network**         477,416       7.1          22.4%
ADAP.TV**                            446,173       8.8          16.8%
Microsoft Sites                      426,839      11.1          12.8%
BrightRoll Video Network**           386,658       6.3          20.4%
NABBR.com**                          331,232      27.2           4.0%
CBS Interactive                      279,976       9.5           9.7%
Google Sites                         241,233       4.9          16.3%
AOL, Inc.                            216,854       6.5          11.1%
CWTV.com                             200,483      68.5           1.0%

*Video ads include streaming-video advertising only and do not include other types of video
monetization, such as overlays, branded players, matching banner ads, homepage ads, etc.

**Indicates video ad network

Other notable findings from November 2010 include:

• The top video ad networks in terms of their potential reach of the total U.S. population were: ScanScout Network at 44.3 percent, BrightRoll Video Network at 41.5 percent and Break Media at 39.9 percent.
• 84.2 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The duration of the average online content video was 5.1 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.
• Video ads accounted for 15.3 percent of all videos viewed and 1.4 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.