Online Video Watching Up in June, with Google reaching 7.6 billion videos

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Online video watching has drastically increased in the month of June with more than 157 million users in the US having watched a video online. The drastic increase is mainly attributed to some major events that took place in the same month like Michael Jackson’s death and the Iranian protests according to a ComScore report: “The surge in video viewing is primarily attributable to important news stories circulating in June, including Michael Jackson’s death and the Iranian elections, which generated sizeable gains particularly at major media properties such as Viacom Digital (includes MTV), Microsoft Sites (includes MSNBC) and Turner Network (includes CNN)”.

Google sites still made it to the top of the list with more than 7.6 billion videos streamed, 99% of which were on YouTube. Moreover, Google video sites registered 112 million unique visitors out of 157 million who watched a video online in June. Viacom Digital Properties came in second spot with 774 million videos streams, that is 10 times less views while Microsoft had 696 million videos watched and 72 million unique visitors.

Video search engine Blinkx doubled its number of video streams and jumped to the fourth place from the sixth last month with 623 million views. Tuner, which owns CNN, also doubled it video streams to 496 million while Hulu dropped from third place to seventh mainly because most TV shows end in May.