Categories: Articles

Nine Billion Videos Viewed Online in July

I could hardly believe it myself when I read it.

One of my favourite email newsletters is still Research Brief from the Center For Media Research, and when I saw the headline, Nine Billion Videos Viewed Online in July, I thought it was typo.

“According to a comScore recent release, nearly 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched an average of three hours of online video during the month of July, with Americans viewing more than 9 billion videos online.”

I’m not sure if I ever Blogged my thoughts about online video, but the rise in popularity of channels like YouTube definitely took this Digital Marketing guy by surprise. I always believed that consumers don’t just want to sit and stare at a computer screen… that’s what they were doing with television. Especially when you factor in the quality of online video and the bandwidth buffering issues that still persist to this day. I have the humility to say that I was (and still am) shocked that in an interactive environment like Web still has people who are eager to sit back and passively watch videos.

And then this news. Seventy five percent of Internet users watched nearly three hours of online videos in one month totaling more than nine billion videos.

That’s billion with an Austin Powers‘ Dr. Evil pinkie-to-mouth.

The one thing I do know: none of us can fathom how big nine billion truly is.

Do you know how many people, worldwide, are now online? I was watching the G4 TV show, The Lab With Leo Laporte, and it was one of his trivia questions prior to a commercial break. According to the show, it’s over one billion people now.

Here are a few other notable findings from the comScore release:

– The average online video duration was 2.7 minutes.
– More than one out of three (36.7 percent) U.S. Internet users viewed video on YouTube.com.
– The average online video viewer consumed 68 videos, or more than two per day.

You can read the news items here: Center For Media Research – Nine Billion Videos Viewed Online in July.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.