Thanks to the Writers Strike, Online Video Is Up—And Men Prefer YouTube
Online video got a huge boost from the Hollywood writers strike. InformationWeek.com reported that “U.S. Internet users watched more than 10 billion videos in December.” That’s nearly 141 million Americans!
Google was the big winner, with YouTube capturing 97 percent of all videos viewed on its sites:
On YouTube, 77.6 million viewers in December watched an average of 41.6 videos apiece. On Fox’s MySpace, the Web’s most trafficked social network, 40.5 million people watched 334 million videos.Video lovers watched an average of 3.4 hours of video during the month, representing a 34% gain since the beginning of 2007. The average online video lasted 2.8 minutes, and the average viewer watched 72 videos.
Meanwhile, Ars Technica reported on findings released by Nielsen’s Video Census, a syndicated online video measurement service. In December, their analysis revealed that men prefer user-generated videos-like those shown on YouTube-while women tend to prefer streaming video of network TV shows:
...Nielsen found that women aged 18 to 34 were almost twice as likely as men of the same age group to watch network TV streams, like those offered on NBC.com or Hulu. Nielsen did not provide an explanation, but it may be that men are more likely to get their TV shows in other ways (e.g., via BitTorrent). There appeared to be no accounting for iTunes (still one of the most popular destinations for online video) because it is not a web-based service.
In contrast, men 18 to 34:
...were more than twice as likely to check out user-generated video sites as women, with YouTube being their number one destination. Veoh, Break.com, and MySpace Video were also popular destinations, though, and Nielsen says this is because user-generated video is all viral. “With shorter clips and a viral nature, [Consumer Generated Media] Web sites are much more about discovery, and consumers are likely to view content on more than one,” said Nielsen Online’s Michael Pond.
Furthermore, Nielsen found that people who watched user-generated videoat night and on weekends between 11 PM and 6 AM. Streaming video from network sites was most popular during the week from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m.—in other words, at lunch. “These results indicate that the largest appetite for streaming broadcast content is during the noontime hours, when viewers take a break from work to catch up on the shows they enjoy,” Pond said.
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