Web video still short attention span theater

The latest numbers from comScore show that YouTube is still dominating the Web video market, with 38% of the 11 billion videos viewed online in April through the Google-owned site.

The rest of the market is so fragmented that no other Web media property has double-digit market share. Fox Interactive had 5%, while Yahoo sites represented another 3% and Microsoft sites, 2.4%.

Just over 82 million viewers watched 4.1 billion videos, or 50 per viewer.

People between 18 and 34 years old, the demographic so prized by marketers, still watch the most, with an average of 287 minutes, or more than four hours worth for the month.

With those numbers, it's just a matter of time before brand marketers start to spend more dollars online.

As we've reported here and here, though, the online video ad industry still has some work to do.

Lastly, and true to the YouTube form, the average viewing time was only 2.8 minutes.

That suggests the market is bifurcated, because Move Networks said not too long ago that the average viewing time for videos run over their platform is close to an hour. 

Hulu, which hosts full-length shows from News Corp. and NBC, is also serving up more ads.

But give that average viewing figure, most Web videos viewed are short, user-generated fare that either are shorter than three minutes or simply stop being interesting after that time. 

Top U.S. Online Video Properties* by Videos Viewed
April 2008
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore Video Metrix

Property                     Videos         Share (%) of
                              (000)            Videos
Total Internet              10,999,597          100.0
Google Sites                 4,159,850           37.9
Fox Interactive Media          557,663            5.1
Yahoo! Sites                   352,359            3.2
Microsoft Sites                268,033            2.4
Viacom Digital                 199,968            1.8
Time Warner - Excl. AOL        138,771            1.3
ABC.COM                        103,421            0.9
Disney Online                   98,740            0.9
AOL LLC                         95,288            0.9
ESPN                            83,424            0.8
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*Rankings based on video content sites; excludes video server networks.  Online video includes both streaming and progressive download video.