In total, the average viewer watched about 135 video clips. While full-length shows are becoming more popular, it is still important to note that the average video is only 3.7 minutes long. Hulu, which focuses on full-length TV shows, also recorded its best month yet, with 457 million views.

Another Record-Breaking Month

June, according to comScore, already broke most records, but at that time, the company credited the surge to the large number of high-profile events (including the death of Michael Jackson and the elections in Iran). ComScore argues that TV viewers are turning to the Internet right now because most of the shows on TV are currently on summer hiatus. While this probably plays some role in this current growth in interest in online video, we would also argue that a lot of viewers are simply changing their viewing habits and have moved away from watching shows on traditional TV and cable networks. Instead, they are watching popular clips on YouTube and full-length shows on Hulu.

To gather its data, Nielsen monitors about 200,000 panel members, a technique that is clearly informed by Nielsen's method for gathering data about TV viewers. Other metrics companies use data from toolbars, ISPs, and other sources, though Quantcast also gives site owners the option to embed a code snippet on their pages that reports data directly to Quantcast (Hulu does so, for example, and so does RWW).

Stats Need Standards

The real problem here, of course, isn't even about knowing exactly how many people watched videos on Hulu last month (even though we have to admit that this discussion is quite interesting in its own right). Instead, this kerfuffle once again shows how hard it is to correctly estimate usage numbers on the web, especially in the absence of any real standards. As every blogger can easily attest, three different stats programs will give you three different numbers.

We have to take publicly available stats, no matter from which provider, with a grain of salt. In our experience, it is always worth looking at a number of different sources, and while the trends that these services show tend to be relatively trustworthy, the exact numbers are always open for debate.

Fred Wilson points out that Americans who accessed the Internet from their desktops and laptops were responsible for about 192 million monthly uniques, which, if we trust comScore's numbers, would mean that the mobile web is now close to 1/3 the size of the 'wired' web. Developers who ignore the mobile clearly do so at their own peril, and thanks to the rising popularity of smartphones, this trend towards accessing the Internet from mobile devices will surely only accelerate.

However, comScore also notes that while 22.3 million people accessed news and information services through a downloadable application, 32.4 million used SMS. While smartphones are indeed getting more popular, comScore also found that 70% of those users who accessed mobile Internet sources did so on standard feature phones.

CC-licensed logo image used courtesy of Flickr user bjortklingd.

Comscore issued their report for July website traffic in the online video sector today and two numbers really stand out. The company estimates that US web users viewed more than 5 billion videos that month and says that 75 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in July. Those are some pretty high numbers, but 3rd party traffic stats always have to be taken with a giant grain of salt. Do you believe that online video is this universal yet?

• The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.


• 91 million viewers watched 5 billion videos on YouTube.com (54.8 videos per viewer).


• 51.4 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (7.8 videos per viewer).


• The duration of the average online video was 2.9 minutes.

How good are these numbers from Comscore? It's hard to know. The company is widely respected, but so is Hitwise, another traffic analyst firm that comes up with very different numbers. See our write up in June of a Hitwise report that argued that the video market in general was declining but that YouTube had a 75% marketshare in May. Comscore reports that YouTube has a 44% marketshare. Both companies agree on who the leaders are, perhaps Comscore is just looking further out the long tail in who it includes in the category.

All of these numbers are subject to interpretation and no one's data collection method is anywhere near perfect. Do you believe the assertion that 75% of the US market online watched online video in July? We regularly talk to people who don't know the first thing about anything regarding the internet, but perhaps even they spend time on YouTube or use Windows Media Player to watch news video on the big news portals.

Let us know your take on the believability of these numbers in the poll above. For more details, see Comscore's full report.

The below graph shows minutes spent on site. Once again it's sorry reading for digg, which is trending downwards while Buzz goes up.

Finally, here are charts showing that Buzz is almost identical to the mainstream men/women Internet split, while digg users are 61% men.