Sizing the Online Video Market
Following yesterday’s post regarding the rising in the overall online video market I wanted to focus today on individual site performance. However, I ran into a small problem regarding information availability. Usually online video press releases just delve into unique users or total video streams. These dimensions can be attractive for their simplicity but they don’t paint the whole picture.
To truly see how much video activity a site is attracting, three dimensions have to combined:
- Amount of unique viewers
- Amount of streams viewed
- Video time being viewed (per stream or per viewer)
Of course online video measurement firms know this but limit the public dissemination of information, particularly it seems regarding the element of time. However, comScore has provided time information regarding the average time per viewer for Hulu and the average duration for all online videos at any site. Based on this information it is possible to draw a comparison of Hulu’s comparison to the market as a whole.
Based on this information, there was a total of 1.3 billion hours of video consumed online in the U.S. during the month of July. This is 71% more than the 770 million hours viewed in December 2008. Hulu’s traffic has also grown, serving up 46.4 million hours of video in July, up from 40.5 million hours in December 2008.
Although Hulu’s popularity has been rising, its share of the total video market has been falling. This is because it is attracting more unique viewers at a lower rate than other properties. According to comScore, 76% of the total unique viewers use YouTube (up from 66% in December) while Hulu has about a 24% share. Another challenge for Hulu is that their average video consumption is falling. In December 2009 a viewer watched 99 minutes of video but in July the figure had fallen to 73 minutes. Since Hulu has 14 million more unique viewers in July, this may be a result of lighter users entering their user base.
Unfortunately information regarding viewing time was not available for YouTube, MySpace or other video sites. I’ll keep an eye out in the future for such information. A comparison between these sites would be much more interesting.