Online Video Viewing Numbers Grow in July with Record Viewers

It's the middle of the month and that means it's time once again for the comScore analysis of online video for the previous month. July saw, according to comScore (which we know won't mesh with Nielsen), 184 million viewers, which is a new record in their Video Metrix. They watched 36.9 billion 'videos' and averaged 1336.8 minutes each, also up from previous summer months. Just looking at June to July it's 4 million more viewers, 3.9 billion more 'videos' and just about 100 more minutes on average (must have been my 60 hours of viewing).

comScore has yet to modify its version of a 'video' which they define as 3 seconds or more of video streaming (which I can do on accident 100 times a week) and includes auto-play, but doesn't discern between it and user-initiated and counts each segment of a single piece of content, intersected by an ad pod, as a separate video. So the total 'videos' has to be larger than the actual pieces of content as lots of video online, like almost everything at Hulu, have mid-rolls.

As always, I'll break out the online video advertising numbers to its own article and I'll plug in these numbers to my trend charts so we can see how things are progressing. If you are interested in a specific chart for the number trends, drop me a line and I'll work on it for next month.

Google remains the king and even added a few million unique viewers on the month, must be all that great new original content that's popping up on YouTube as they also net about 41 more minutes per viewer. Facebook jumped Yahoo! for second place, Viacom dropped below Microsoft and AOL, NDN showed up out of nowhere and pushed Vimeo out of the top ten. I'm guessing that NDN is News Distribution Network, the video news service.

*A video is defined as any streamed segment of audiovisual content, including both progressive downloads and live streams. For long-form, segmented content, (e.g. television episodes with ad pods in the middle) each segment of the content is counted as a distinct video stream.Video views are inclusive of both user-initiated and auto-played videos that are viewed for longer than 3 seconds.

Top 10 YouTube Partner Channels by Unique Viewers

While I don't usually have much to say here, I see some interesting changes happening. Machinima takes back second place from Warner Music this month (original content over music videos), Alloy shows up in the top ten (Dating Rules from My Future Self, Teen.com, gUrl, Smosh) which shows that they certainly know teens and tweens (because they make such horrible TV shows as the Vampire Diaries which ranks up there with Twilight as lamest vampires ever). Movieclips and Clevvertv are out this month. I guess that really says something about a large section of the YouTube audience...

*YouTube Partner Reporting based on online video content viewing and does not include claimed user-generated content

Other notable findings from July 2012 include:

• 85.5 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The duration of the average online content video was 6.7 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.
• Video ads accounted for 20.7 percent of all videos viewed and 1.6 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

My Analysis

It's a weird cycle when July's average minutes per viewer is almost as high as January but the number of viewers is higher, perhaps it was the horrible temperatures keeping people inside in July while milder winter temps allowed people to do other things in January? The number of videos for the month is actually fifth overall in the chart. It looks like those 4 million additional viewers watched 4 billion additional videos, but that's not really how it works.

The graph below has the UV and videos on the left axis and the average minutes per viewer on the right axis for clarity and to get a finer amount of detail in the graph. The jump in unique viewers takes it to a record high with the second-most average minutes per viewer.