Vevo: mobile traffic doubled quarter to quarter

Music video website saw 40 billion videos streamed in the past year

The reports of the death of the music video have been greatly exaggerated. MTV may have stopped playing them a long time ago, in favor of shows that are designed to make your skin crawl instead, but enough people still want to watch music videos that Vevo saw its numbers jump dramatically in the past year, especially when it came to mobile.

Mobile traffic nearly doubled from the first to second quarter of 2012, Vevo stated in its U.S. Music Video Viewership Report Tuesday. The music video website site saw 1.3 billion mobile streams globally in the quarter.

Mobile is Vevo’s fastest growing platform. Its smartphone and tablet has now been downloaded 18 million times so far, an increase of 146% from the second quarter of 2011, with iOS being its most popular platform.

From quarter to quarter, monthly active users grew 33% to 5 million in June, while the average number of videos watched on mobile grew 11%, to 15 per user.

Overall, 40 billion videos were watched from July 2011 to June 2012, with 9.3 billion of those in the United States. On average, that is 103 million videos watched per day. The website sees 3 billion worldwide video streams per month.

Global unique viewers in May hit 431 million, better than the average 429 for the quarter, which was an increase of 5% from the same time last year.

 May also saw 3.3 billion video streams, slightly better than the average of 3.2 billion for the quarter.

The report also found that music videos, even on mobile, are still a social experience. 87% of overall viewers watched videos with other people, and 64% of mobile viewers did the same thing.

Back in March, Vevo rolled out a redesign that included a Facebook playlist, iTunes syncing and continuous play to better recommend and offer music all the time for its viewers. Vevo also debuted an iTunes Match to scan your iTunes library to create a playlist of music videos that matches your most listened-to artists.

In the two months after VEVO changed up its platform, it reported a 600% increase in published or watched videos compared to what it had been seeing in February.

VEVO is a joint venture between Sony Music, Universal Music, and Abu Dhabi Media, to create a Hulu for music videos. Vevo has also signed licensing agreements so that YouTube can republish the Vevo content. A comScore report from last month found that the Vevo YouTube channel had the highest total unique viewers.

Despite all of that good news, Vevo says that month-to-month traffic saw a slight dip of less than 10%. Vevo attributes this to “achange in priority for what YouTube, an important VEVO syndication partner, promotes in its home pages,” and “fewer music releases from superstar artists,” which it says will come out in the second half of the year.

Oh, and the most popular video during the second quarter of 2012: in case you couldn’t guess it was Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe.

(Image source: crunchbase.com)