Numbers, numbers and more numbers
Tracking the Internet video world – which practically no one was tracking just a year ago – has become a full time business for some.
Here are some of the more interesting numbers people have dug up recently…
First, who’s using Internet video?
The biggest audience numerically are 18 to 24 year olds. 119 million of them are Internet video viewers, but when it comes to market penetration 35 to 49 year olds are the heaviest users with 30.8% viewing Internet videos compared to only 16% of 18 to 24 year olds.
The biggest slice of the marketplace is males 35 to 49 year olds (16.5%), followed by males 50+ (14.5%), females 35 to 49 (14.4%), females 50+ (11%), males 25 to 34 (8.1%), females 25 to 34 (7.9%), females 18 to 24 (7.7%), females 2 to 17 (7.1%), males 2 to 17 (6.5%) and males 18 to 24 (6.4%).
In other words, anyone that thinks Internet video is "kid stuff" is very mistaken.
Who’s serving the most video?
Until very recently, it was YouTube by a mile. In July, they streamed three times as much video as their nearest competitor Google Video.
But a funny thing happened in the Internet video wars…MySpace came out of nowhere and blew YouTube out of the water. According to July numbers from Comscore. MySpace users downloaded 1.5 billion videos, more than two times YouTubes numbers.
MySpace claims that it generates 60 to 70% of YouTubes traffic as it is. YouTube disputes that MySpace is a dominant source of traffic for them. Someone’s wrong.
But the conflicting claims of MySpace and YouTube are not the issue. It’s all a bunch of talk for Wall Street anyway and doesn’t impact any of us one way or the other.
Here’s the real significance of this news…
Internet video has arrived and become a major force on the Internet.
Since I first started alerting subscribers in the summer of 2005, video has a way of taking over. In fact, I would not be surprised if the Internet evolves primarily into a video-on-demand medium in the public’s mind.
Text will always be be important, but if you look at history, the spread of television viewership cut a huge slice out of the publishing industry’s pie. Newspapers disappeared by the hundreds and photo magazines like "Life" lost their appeal.
If your your business uses the Internet to sell, take the time now to make friends with video. Now. The writing is truly on the wall.
P.S. Do you want to be notified when new articles like this one are posted to the blog?
Ken McCarthy was one of the pioneers of the movement to commercialize
the Internet and was involved in early tests of what have become
Internet promotion mainstays like e-mail marketing, banner ads, and
pay-per-click advertising. If you go to Google Video and search the
term "marketing," a short film about his work is often in the top ten,
if not the number #1.
It’s easy. Just go to this page and we’ll add your name to our bulletin list:
http://www.internetvideomarketingletter.com/
Copyright: Ken McCarthy, 2006
Reprint rights: You may reprint this article in full as long as you print it in it’s entirely including the P.S.