The use of online video has gone beyond the borders of the extraordinary.
According to a new study by comScore, 175 million people watched video online last month. Americans spent 5.2 billion “sessions” on video sites. A session could include one video, or 100.
YouTube still dominates the online video universe. The site had 1.9 billion
viewing sessions and the average time spent on the site per view last month
was 260 minutes. There is no evidence that YouTube makes any money on its
service. Industry analysts believe that the firm’s revenue could be as high
as $450 million which is not likely to cover more than the site’s bandwidth,
storage, and other costs related to operations. YouTube has struggled to convince marketers that it is more than just a place for amateurs to post grainy video. A look at YouTube shows that this impression is correct although some Hollywood studios and advertisers like Sprint use
YouTube to reach consumers. Most YouTube pages, though, have no
marketing messages.
It is extraordinary to consider that YouTube could have such impressive traffic and have nearly nothing to show for it.Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) follows YouTube as a distant second in September viewership 54.4 million users. Behind Yahoo! is Facebook, which should threaten the portals. Not only are their users headed off to social networks along with their advertisers, but now people who watch video online have begun to use Facebook. Facebook is, in theory, the only online site that could post large growth because members can swap an ever-burgeoning number of video posts for their friends.
The most troubling part of the comScore numbers is that Hulu, the champion
of premium video online, ranked No.9 among all video sites with only 30 million unique visitors in September. Average minutes spent on the site for the month were 162, which is still well short of YouTube. The amateurs continue to trump what large media companies have to offer in content that has cost them millions if not tens of millions of dollars to create
The new data shows how far the online video industry is from a period when
people turn to the internet for something beyond short clips of laughing babies and farting preachers. Since YouTube, Hulu, and other services are used on mobile devices as well as PCs, the Droid, the iPhone, and the BlackBerry are not likely to offer the large content companies any comfort. Online video is still little more than a hobby for the great majority of Americans.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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