Nielsen Reports Majority of Online Video Viewers are Women

Now here's something extremely interesting if you put much stock in it. Nielsen, in its State of the Media
Trends in TV Viewing—2011 TV Upfronts, stated that 54% of online video viewers are...female. That sort of flies in the face of what we have been seeing from all other research outfits up until now.

They also say that only 143.9 million Americans watched online video in January 2011 which is some 30 million off what comScore says. Maybe more women are hooked into the Nielsen network and not the comScore network? That might explain the separation maybe 10% in gender reports.

Along ethnicity lines, 77.9% of online video viewers are "white" (Don't call me white! -NOFX), 12.1% hispanic, 10.6% African-American, 3.5% Asian and 1% Native American Indian with 7% listed as "other."

Theoretically, 42% of online video viewers are then "white women" from what Nielsen says based on their Video Census 2011 Home and Work.

That's some pretty big numbers and it seems that there's been a shift in who is watching video online. As recently as last year comScore reported that there was a majority of men who watched video online, not only in the US, but also in Australia, Japan, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore and the UK. If the US has flip-flopped (remember, apples to oranges = Nielsen to comScore) then we would have joined Germany and Hong Kong as they have female online viewing majorities. I guess we need independent verification from a secondary source. If both Nielsen and comScore say that's the case, then you marketers out there should be tweaking your campaigns.