Online video viewing has increased dramatically over the past year, according to US data from Nielsen Online.
The Nielsen chart above shows an increase in the number of viewers, but even stronger growth in the number of minutes that each viewer spent, on average, watching online video. This made me wonder about the growth in total minutes of online video, so I decided to work it out:
May 2009: 133.8 million viewers x 188.7 minutes/viewer = 25.2 billion minutes
May 2008: 118.6 million viewers x 126.7 minutes/viewer = 15.0 billion minutes
The change in total minutes of online video is 25.2/15.0, or an increase of 68 per cent.
(I derived the May 2008 numbers by reversing the percentage changes provided by Nielsen.)
YouTube was by far the leader in video delivery, with more than 95 million unique visitors last month, and more than six billion video streams.