comScore: 132 Mil. Users Viewing Over 2.5 Hours of Streamed Video

July 17, 2007
Mike Shields (Mediaweek)

Watching a considerable amount of video on the Internet has become standard practice for the vast majority of Web users, as nearly three-quarters of them streamed more than two-and-a-half hours of video online in May, according to a new report from comScore.

ComScore's latest Video Metrix report found that a staggering 74 percent of Web users, or 132 million Americans, watched an average of 158 minutes worth of videos during the month of May. For the typical user, comScore found that video-watching is increasingly a regular habit, as they viewed an average of 63 streams during May - or more than two per day - with most clips running two-and-a-half minutes in length.

And while video content becomes more ubiquitous across the Internet, Google has established an early and enviable dominance in the space, as the company's portfolio of sites accounted for 21.5 percent of all streams recorded by comScore during that month, with more than a third of users (35 percent) streaming clips on Google-owned YouTube. In fact, of the 1.8 billion videos streamed on Google properties during May - nearly three times the number generated by the closest competitor - 1.7 billion were streamed on YouTube, according to comScore.

Fox Interactive Media, driven in large part by MySpace, ranked second in the number of videos streamed last month, with 680 million streams, followed by Yahoo (387 million streams) and Viacom properties (237 million streams). In terms of unique streamers, the disparity between the players at the top is not as large, found comScore, as 65 million users streamed videos on Google sites versus 53 million on Fox properties and 35 million on Yahoo sites.