More Than 174 Million U.S. Internet Users Watched 28.1 Billion Videos Online in February
comScore Video Metrix today announced that more than 174 million U.S. Internet users watched 28.1 billion videos online in February 2010.
That’s more Americans than watched the Super Bowl that month.
A record 106.5 million people watched the New Orleans Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts 31-17 in Super Bowl XLIV on CBS, according to Nielsen. That’s not only the biggest audience to date for the Super Bowl, but the biggest audience for a televised event in the U.S. ever — knocking off the finale of “MASH” on CBS, which averaged almost 106 million viewers when it ran back in 1983.
Yep, online video is even bigger.
Other news nuggets from comScore:
YouTube.com accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed at Google Sites, which means that Google Video accounted for less than 1 percent. So, if you are optimizing the videos on your website so that Google Video can crawl and index them, then you are wasting a lot of time and effort.
Get it? Got it? Good.
Now, if you do the math, 28.1 billion videos divided by more than 174 million viewers means the average viewer watched 161 videos during the month of February. And comScore reported that the duration of the average online video was 4.3 minutes. So, if you do a little more math, this means that the average viewer watched 692.3 minutes of online video that month. That’s about 11.5 hours.
Here’s another factoid to digest: 83.1 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video. That’s about as mainstream as it gets.
Oh, and one last stat: 132.4 million viewers watched 11.9 billion videos on YouTube.com, or 42.3 percent of all online videos viewed. Hulu ranked second in videos viewed, with 39.2 million viewers watching 912.5 million videos, or 3.2 percent of all online videos viewed. Yahoo! ranked second in unique viewers, with 53.5 million viewers watching 454.7 million videos, or 1.6 percent of all online videos viewed.
So, yes, there is a universe beyond YouTube, but it is made of up a few small asteroids and a lot of cosmic dust particles.