The latest comScore online video report (the most frequent out there) is out for the month of August 2012, and again the stats are very interesting:
- An all-time high of 188 million U.S. Internet users watched online video;
- That corresponds to 87.3 percent of the U.S. Internet audience;
- This accounted for 37.7 billion online content videos in August. This number is also up from the 36.9 billion in July 2012
- The duration of the average online content video was 6.7 minutes (exactly the same as the previous month);
- Video ad views totaled 9.5 billion – slightly down from the 9.6 billion in July 2012;
- The average online video ad was 0.4 minutes (also exactly the same as the previous month).
- Video ads accounted for 20.1 percent of all videos viewed and 1.4 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.
- No surprise that Google Sites (Youtube) is the number one when it comes to web properties but I think for the first time, Yahoo Sites comes second. Once again, Facebook goes down in the ranks (after a climb from 5th and 6th places in the previous months).
- And, once again, Google topped the ranks by ads seen, making Hulu now in a distant 4th place.
So what do these numbers tell us?
First and foremost, online video in the US is showing a strong stabilization around very big numbers, not only regular video content but video ads too.
Second that Google’s strategy with online video ads is paying off, dethroning Hulu from its first place in video ads once again. And that is certainly contributing to the rise of video ads that has been seen in the past few months.
