75 percent of online users watch video

Don’t bury the lead.

And for those fair readers who thought I was buried somewhere between New Castle and Poulsbo, rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated, more on that at the bottom of the post.

This statistic comes from a comScore report, but was brought to my attention by The Agitator.

Additionally that comScore report found that the average time people are watching videos is 3-5 minutes, not the 1  1/2-  to 2-minute range we advise the ministries we work with.

But before you fire up the camera for that long-form video, remember averages are often skewed by large numbers at either end of the spectrum. In other words a few folks watching full-length movies, say on Hulu.com, could skew that number up fairly easily.

Bottom line, video engages people exponentially longer than a web page alone. We used to say you had eight seconds to capture a user with a web page, now I usually say its down to two or three seconds. Which means that people, on average, will engage with a video for 80 times longer then they do with a web page alone.

So if three-quarters of the folks on the internet watch video and they engage with it nearly two orders of magnitude longer than just a web page – say it with me now – you need to be doing online video.

Personal Note: I know I haven’t been writing as often, but things are busy both here at Masterworks and at home. Family and work come first, so posting to the blog comes fourth. Second is a two-way tie between bicycling and sitting in airports. Good news, we’ve been working on some exciting stuff that we’ll announce in these pages soon!

This post was published by Jacob Smith on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 7:40 am in Blog, Multichannel Integration, Technology Highlights and tagged as ComScore, Hulu, Video.

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