This week, comScore released video rankings for May 2011, and the trends continue to show strong growth for online video viewing. The company reported that the average online video viewer watched nearly 16 hours in May, up 19% year-over-year. The number of unique viewers - that is, number of unique IP addresses that played a video from a website - declined 4% from the May 2010 number, although it must be said that the 2010 number was the highest number recorded since comScore began keeping score.
To give some context to these numbers, the average TV viewer, according to Nielsen, watches five hours of TV a day. The comScore numbers put average online video viewing at just under 31 minutes of a day. By comparison, the average Netflix streamer watches 47 minutes a day of Netflix-sourced shows and movies.
One interesting note about the comScore numbers is that Netflix doesn't rank in the top ten sites (Hulu squeaks in at number 10). This may sound strange, particularly when we hear reports in the news that Netflix is accounting for as much as 30% of Internet bandwidth at peak viewing times. However, this stems from the fact that this is based on the total number of unique viewers. By this ranking, one might estimate that Netflix has around 15 million unique viewers. Hulu, by comparison, has a reported 27 million, primarily courtesy of the free site, not the subscription Hulu Plus service.
ComScore also reports the number of minutes per viewer spent at a particular site. For example, the average Hulu viewer spent 218 minutes at the site last month. By this measure, we estimate the average Netflix streamer would have spent more than 900 minutes, making it by far the most popular site in terms of engagement.
Whichever way you look at it, online video continues to be a key driver of online use. As consumption becomes more common at the television, we expect consumption patterns to resemble broadcast television consumption: which means much of that five hours a day we currently watch will be coming over the Internet.
ShareThis