Skip to main content

Nielsen: American online video declining over summer

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.

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.

Editors' Recommendations

Geoff Duncan
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
The 23andMe data breach just keeps getting scarier
A 23andMe kit

The 23andMe breach that took place in October has been confirmed as much worse than originally reported, affecting 6.9 million people, as opposed to the 14,000 users first thought.

Information stolen in the breach included users' full names, birth years, relationship labels, and locations. Approximately 1.4 million users also had Family Tree profile information on the service compromised. Hackers could also access genetic information in the breach, including details about common DNA percentages shared with relatives, and specifics such as chromosome matching, according to a spokesperson.

Read more
Apple has a chance to fix its worst product next year
Magic Mouse next to a Mac keyboard on a desk.

Apple updated all of its Mac desktops in 2024, but left the worst part untouched: the accessories. In particular, we're talking about the infamous Magic Mouse. The mouse has been dunked on for years at this point, often pointed to as an example of the worst of Apple's design ethos. Despite all the positive changes to Macs over the past few years, the Magic Mouse has remained stagnant.

A new report, however, indicates that the Mac accessories will undergo a major change in early 2024. The Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad, and Magic Mouse will reportedly all be moving to USB-C to match the latest iPhone, after having previously used the Apple-exclusive Lightning connection. This seems like an obvious change that probably should have happened earlier. In fact, it was even rumored to happen in time for the launch of the M3 iMac -- but it didn't.

Read more
Apple has a chance to fix Mac gaming for good in 2024
Lies of P being played on an iMac.

Looking back, 2023 was a banner year for Mac gaming. As a gamer, it feels really surreal to say that, given how disappointing the past has been. But it’s true -- and for the first time in a long time, the sun is shining on Mac gamers.

We’ve had the M3 series of chips with hardware ray tracing, mesh shading, and improved GPUs. On the software side, Apple has built-in tools like Game Mode and a game porting toolkit into macOS. And some massive games have come to the Mac, including Baldur’s Gate 3 and Lies of P.

Read more