Time Spent Viewing Online Video Soars by 42%

With traffic to video sharing websites constantly growing, it’s obvious that the channel is gradually turning into a key area of interest for consumers. In fact, over four in five UK Internet users watch video online and more people are now exposed to video ads, according to recent data from the comScore Video Metrix service.

Data shows that in January 80% of Internet users in Britain, or 34.2m people, saw a total of 8.4bn videos lasting for 58.8bn minutes. Despite the fact that the audience has not grown overall over the past six months, the number of videos seen has increased by 28% and the time that consumers spend on this activity has soared by 42%.

Perhaps more important for us, marketers, is the increase in the number of people watching video ads online, with almost two in three users now watching video ads. The younger users, aged 15 to 24, are the most enthusiastic viewers as far as the number of unique visits and engagement.

The benchmark study reveals no surprises in terms of most heavily trafficked video sites. Google-operated pages are still the most visited in the UK, with almost 30m unique visits, accounting for 3.7bn videos for 15.9bn minutes. YouTube remains unrivalled at the top, accounting for 99.5% of all videos seen on Google’s sites, followed by music video platform VEVO and Facebook.