New numbers from online measurement company comScore suggest that nearly 80 percent of all Internet users now view video on a regular basis. This year over last, there has been “double digit growth in terms of time spent viewing, in terms of the number of videos watched, and I can only see that continuing to grow with long format content being more freely available, particularly from a lot of premium broadcasters,” says Tania Yuki of comScore in an interview with Beet.tv.
Most of the traffic is where you’d expect — Google’s YouTube makes up 42.5 percent of all videos watched. While the number of videos served by Hulu make up little more than 3 percent of all video traffic, Hulu viewers watched an average of 2.4 hours in February. The total number of videos watched was down in February from January, and Christophor Rick of ReelSEO speculates that’s because there were new first-run series in February, so the audience was watching TV in real time.
New numbers from Brightcove and TubeMogul look promising as well. Broadcasters who stream from Brightcove have seen a 74 percent increase in traffic the first quarter of this year, while they’ve posted only 10 percent more material than in the first quarter last year.
Keep in mind, these are numbers from one streaming service only, and based on a sampling of their customers. Here’s Brightcove’s note on how they got their data: “The new quarterly report takes a sample of aggregate data representing a cross section of platform customers. While we make no claim that our sample is statistically representative of the online video industry as a whole or of Brightcove’s entire customer base, the research does provide a directional snapshot of trends in platform usage, consumer behavior, and industry sentiment.”
The report is based on three sources: the sample of Brightcove media customers, “consumer engagement reports” based on TubeMogul’s analysis of the sample data, and the results of a survey of 104 Brightcove media customers.
New TeeVee points out where the Web video traffic comes from: “Most video views come from direct traffic, with 51.8 percent of all streams watched after a viewer was already on the publisher’s site. Viewers turned to Google search next, which made up 38.9 percent of all referrals, followed by Yahoo (5.6 percent), Microsoft’s Bing (2.3 percent) and Facebook (0.4 percent).”
MediaPost’s VidBlog highlights some interesting information from the research: while Twitter didn’t even show up in the list of referrers to video traffic, those who click on video links from Twitter have a much longer engagement time with the videos than those who come to the videos from other links. “The exception to this rule was Tweets landing on newspaper sites, where Yahoo customers viewed one second longer than Twitter refers,” Steve Smith points out, which suggests you need to have a strategy for using Twitter to let viewers know about video.
TechCrunch takes a look at the same report  and says that newspaper sites have the hardest time getting viewers to their videos. Newspaper websites loaded 2 billion players in the first quarter of this year, and served up 136 million video streams, just under 7 percent of the pages that could have played video. Using player loads vs. streams, almost 57 percent of broadcast videos get watched.
Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch suggests some possible reasons. “Maybe that is because people go to newspaper sites for news and quick hits, and they go to TV sites to watch videos. But even magazine sites are seeing a 12.7 percent hit rate. Again, this could be a time commitment scenario. Most people go to news sites for quick facts and breaking news.”
