At my video company Tap Bang we’ve been bragging for a while now to anyone who would listen about the number of videos viewed in the UK as a justification for why it’s so important to have a video presence online. The figures used to be impressive. Persuasive even. But now comscore have just released a bunch of stats on European online viewing figures that are simply startling.
They tell us that in the UK alone 32.5million people are collectively watching over 5 billion online videos every month. That’s 166 videos a month (or between 5 and 6 a day) for each of those 32.5 million viewers. Let’s face it, 166 of anything a month is a lot.
YouTube unsurprisingly accounts for more than half of the videos viewed in the UK with BBC videos (including all the stuff on iplayer) coming in a distant second.
The time watching these all these 166 videos equates to 17 hours. That’s still a long way short of TV. The googlebox still lives up to its name with a staggering 120 hours a month of viewing for the average Brit. But the gap between TV and online video viewing is closing fast. More importantly I’d hazard a guess that the engagement with the respective advertising from the four hours of daily telly is roughly equivalent to that of watching 6 online videos. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/may/04/thinkbox-television-viewing)
It seems the ever-rising number of video views is accountable to the habit of ‘snacking’ on a sequence of videos. In other words we follow a link to a video we think we might like. Once we’ve finished watching that video YouTube or the BBC suggest several other videos we might like to watch and we just keep clicking. A video ‘snacking’ session is typically 6 online videos in a row.
If we keep going at this rate we’re really only a few years away from the full-blown snacks turning into meals. Mmmmmm tasty.
Posted by trin0580 
Tap Bang's Blog 