The rankings for online video sites for January 2012 have been released by comScore and, what will come as a surprise to few (if any), Google remains the enormously well-fed king in the mead hall of online video traffic. Behind the driving popularity of YouTube, Google’s stats remained relatively the same from December although the number of actual videos watched on Google sites and total unique viewers dwindled a little bit. That’s not entirely unexpected, though, since December’s video traffic might be slightly inflated due to the increase of free time of Internet users thanks to the holidays (also, all those new computers and hand-held devices people received for Christmas probably helped boost December’s numbers). Other than the exchange of NBC Universal for Turner Digital at the tenth spot, the rankings of the top ten video sites remained identical in January.
Whether or not Viacom’s recent partnership with Amazon Prime will affect the media company’s rankings in the future remains to be seen.
As certainly as people are going to watch tons of online video (1,355 minutes per viewer, in fact), so then will advertisements continue to stalk the people. Granted, that’s what makes so much of the video content viewable for free, but it’s still a nag when you see the numbers laid before you like this. In January, Americans watched nearly 39 ads a piece in order to enjoy their online videos, which in the context of an hour of network television probably isn’t much more than what anybody is used to. Americans did somehow manage to watch a lot less of those ads, though: 5.5 million ads for January, down from 7.2 ads in December. Hulu remained the biggest ad pusher in January with 1.5 billion video ads viewed.
On YouTube, VEVO continues to be the page to go to among the site’s partner channels. The channel boasted 50.6 million viewers in January, dwarfing the second-closest partner channel, Warner Music, which attracted 29.7 million viewers.
One last fun fact: almost 85% of online Americans watched some kind of online video. That’s a lotta “Sh*t _____ says” memes you’ve been making (and watching), America.
