Google Dominates Online Video Views; Takes Almost Half of 40 Billion Views

While it’s obvious why Google purchased Youtube in the first place, the latest survey from comScore may surprise you about how dominant the site is when it comes to the number of online videos viewed in a month.

The survey, which analysed last month’s online video viewing figures in the U.S., has revealed the obvious news that Google dominates the web by making up almost half of the 40 billion videos viewed that month. U.S. Internet users had watched almost 40 billion videos online in the month of January alone while Google had made up close to 19 billion of this figure. Its closest rival was VEVO, who Facebook were supposedly interested in, barely making 0.7 billion of the number of videos viewed.Naturally, Google also had the most unique viewers amassing over 151 million during the month, this was three times as many as VEVO again who had 51 million while Yahoo! Sites (49 million) and Viacom Digital (48 million) followed closely behind. The average viewer watched 22.6 hours of online video content, with Google (7.5 hours) and Hulu (3.2 hours) obtaining the highest average engagement of all the sites featured.

As for Youtube itself, it turned out that music video channels had the most success with VEVO (50 million unique viewers) and Warner Music (29 million unique viewers) maintaining the top two positions.  The most online video ads viewed went to online Tv subscription service Hulu which had over 1.4 billion video advert impressions alongside the highest duration of video ads (540 million minutes).

Other interesting findings included that almost 85 per cent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video, video adverts accounted for 12 per cent of all videos viewed and that the duration of the average online video was 6.1 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.The results pretty much state the obvious that video content is growing at an rapid pace but also that there is a financial model for advertising through online videos. While it’s subscription services such as Hulu and BrightRoll who are leading the pack, the news will be encouraging for Youtube – and more specifically Google – who are looking at different financial models to help make the site profitable. The sector is going to keep growing and it could be sooner rather than later that they’ll crack the model that’s needed to thrive.