The growth of online video consumption is nothing short of staggering. In September, Nielsen reported that there were 11 billion video streams watched by 139 million unique users in the U.S., representing growth of 24.8% and 11.3% respectively compared with September 2008. YouTube continues to dominate the market with about 60% of the videos watched and more than 70% of users.
While the total number of visits to a Web site or the number of video streams delivered is an indicator of audience engagement, Sysomos decided to offer an alternate view by looking at social media video engagement by bloggers. Tapping into our extensive database, we measured video engagement within the blogosphere over the past year by looking at the major video-sharing services, and counting the number of links within blog posts to videos either embedded in a post or via a direct link. We believe this kind of activity suggests that a video is interesting enough that bloggers offer a way for readers to engage with it. The complete report can be found here.
Among some of the highlights within the report, which we believe is the first in-depth exploration of how bloggers are engaging with video-sharing services, include:
- YouTube is the most popular video-sharing service used by bloggers, attracting 81.9% of all embedded videos and direct links. Vimeo is a distant second with 8.8%, followed by Dailymotion and MySpace.
- Males in the 20-to-35-year-old demographic constitute the most engaged demographic group in our study. In total, 77% of users are under 35-years old, while 60% of all users are male.
- 90% of the users from Asia and Oceania are under 35-years-old. In comparison, one-third of North American users are more than 35-years-old. Bloggers in Asia and Oceania are less likely to use services other than YouTube, with 89% of the links and embeds pointing to YouTube.
- The countries with bloggers embedding and linking to the most videos are the U.S., Brazil, Spain, the U.K. and Canada. The most active bloggers within particular cities who embed and link to videos are located in New York, Sao Paulo, London and Madrid.
While doing our video study, we also identified the videos that were embedded or linked to the most. Here are the top-five videos for July to September, 2009:
1. JK Wedding Entrance Dance
2. Evian Roller Babies international version
3. SOUR
4. MTV VMAs Remix: Kanye West Interrupts Obama’s Speech
5. United Breaks Guitars
Continue reading the complete report.
