Measured by minutes per viewer, YouTube users spent nearly 7 hours (418 minutes) watching videos, more than twice as many as Hulu viewers who spent 226 minutes in front of the screen. Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) claimed third place with 67 minutes of user viewing. Other online video content providers included in the survey were Vevo, Facebook, Viacom Inc. (NASDAQ: VIA), Aol Inc. (NYSE: AOL), Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), Comcast’s NBC Universal, and Turner Digital, a division of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX).
Interestingly, Google trails every other service in advertising minutes, with just 119 million minutes of total time. Hulu’s ad minutes total 650 million. In total ads viewed, however, the two are much closer: Hulu users viewed about 1.6 billion ads and Google users saw about 1.1 billion ads.
As Google continues to search for ways to monetize its huge video audience the company needs to balance its vast number of viewers with more advertising that won’t drive users away. That may not be as simple to do as it sounds.
Paul Ausick
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