More than 140 million Americans watched 10 billion online videos in December says a report from comscore Video Metrix. That’s about 72 videos per viewer. Video Metrix said the average video was 2.8 minutes. Over the course of a month the average viewer spent three hours and twenty minutes enjoying this new habit that didn’t exist even three years ago.
Google sites had 43 percent of this new attention-getter, followed by Fox (23.9 percent) and Yahoo sites (20.8 percent).
Wired Magazine editor Nancy Miller calls this ”Snack Culture.”
Lord only knows what Americans are snacking on, however, because comScore Video Metrix didn’t say.
[...] Browsers spend three hours plus on videos. Which is why newspapers are jumping all over the things and which, I think, is why newspapers have to make a serious commitment to good video storytelling — not just getting moving pictures online —, given that there are plenty of others out there also after all those eyeballs. [...]
Mark, I appreciate the comment but dispute the premise. I think newspapers should get damn good at accepting user-generated video and they will have less success at getting scribes to do video reports. I have tinkered with video at my print job and the other day I got back from a deadline event with what I thought would be a hot video — Sergey Brin talking about a race to the moon. The story ran on A-1 with a refer to the 1.5 minute video clip that I was able to grab. I do not yet know how to edit the video so I had to persuade one of my mutimedia buddies to drop everything and do the edit/upload. So next day I was eager to get the number. It was a bomb! Now it may have a long tail. But so far it was a total waste of my guy’s time. And we realized it. So what’s the takeaway? I think we would be stupid in newspapers to attempt to recreate television which is also a dying medium — or at least a reborning one. Instead we oulght to focus on getting the user-generated content — because what seems to be getting the traffic is the actual slice of life, the 911 tape, the Rodney King beating, the wierd and unusual stuff that constitutes the playlist for download videos and which professional reporters have no business waiting to stand around waiting to capture — I mean for instance one big story in SF recently was the tiger that escaped from the zoo. What are the chances of a reporter getting a video of that? Nil! What are the chances of a citizen with a cell phone grabbing some gruesomely good footage. Pretty darn good though it seems NOT to have happened here. Now here’s the real question for newspapers: if someone had grabbed that video of the tiger attacking the kid, would that person have thought of uploading it to the local paper? And if the person called the damn paper would anyone there (on Christmas Day mind you!) to know what to do to get that video from the citizen’s device, to the paper’s website, and under what terms and conditions of payment or not. I hope this doesn’t sound nasty or vehement, Mark. I obviously I had some pent up thought to express
[...] Hamilton pointed me to a post by Minimediaguy Tom Abate who picked up on some comscore research on the time spent by users watching [...]