Nielsen: American online video declining over summer

By Geoff Duncan Published July 21, 2011

youtube channels — Image used with permission by copyright holder

New figures from market research firm Nielsen show the number of American tapping into online video during June declined by 1.7 percent compared to May, with a 3.7 percent decline in the number of streams served and a 2.0 percent drop in the number of streams per user. Nielsen also found that the amount of time Americans spent streaming video dropped from four and a half hours in may to just three hours and forty-eight minutes in June.

From these figures, one might speculate a few Americans have something better to do with their summers than watch YouTube—and Nielsen pretty much draws the same conclusion. “With school out of session, the end of the TV season and vacationing Americans, the number of online video viewers in the U.S. decreased slightly in June,” the company wrote on its blog.

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Overall, some 142.6 million Americans watched some 14.5 billion video streams during the month. In terms of the number of unique visitors, Nielsen finds YouTube is far and away the most-trafficked video site on the Internet with over 108 million visitors for the month—and that’s actually down three percent compared to May. In a distant second place with 36 million unique visitors was Vevo, followed by Facebook and Yahoo with 25.3 million and 23 million unique visitors, respectively.

YouTube also easily won the month in terms of total streams—nearly 8.9 billion—while Hulu came in second place with 630 million. However, Hulu’s figure is actually down over 26 percent compared to May, perhaps reflecting the end of U.S. broadcast television’s traditional season. Vevo managed third place with 427 million streams, up three percent compared to May.

However, in terms of the amount of time per viewer that streaming video services captures, Netflix was the clear winner, logging an average of eight hours and thirty-four minutes per viewer—although Nielsen doesn’t offer a comparison to previous months due to changes in Netflix’s URLs. Hulu was a distant second place with average viewer time of three hours and four-two minutes. Ustream.tv managed third place with two hours and fourty-one minutes, with YouTube, Junstin.tv, and Megavideo right on its heels with two hours and thirty-seven minutes, two hours and thirty minutes, and two hours and twenty-eight minutes, respectively.

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