The number of online videos Americans watched in November 2008 grew 34 percent over last year. Users are also boosting their time spent watching videos on the Web as long form videos from Hulu rise in popularity.

It’s no surprise that YouTube has retained the lion’s share of the online video market with 40 percent of all online views. In the month of November, viewers watched over 5 billion YouTube videos according to Comscore.

Second ranked Fox Interactive’s Myspace showed users over 439 million videos, which was still less than a tenth of the front runner. Next comes Viacom Digital’s MTV, then Yahoo and Microsoft.

Fully 77 percent of Internet surfers are now engaged in watching online video. The average watcher logs over four hours of online video watching per month at an average of nine minutes per day.

Now that traditional media companies are actively growing their online audiences, the value of their premium content is beginning to show. Of the top ten online video sites, six are backed by traditional media companies although that includes MySpace.

Where the difference in premium content is really making a difference is with engagement on Hulu. While other online video destinations’ average video length is just 3.1 minutes, Hulu keeps its audience’s attention for an average of 11 minutes at a time.

This may seem like a very short time for a site that shows full length television shows, but its a watershed for online video. Conventional wisdom holds that Web watchers have notoriously short attention spans and are most interested in short form video.

Hulu has skyrocketed to the number six ranked site, but is performing even more strongly in terms of engagement. By keeping users engaged for 11 minutes per view, Hulu is likely number two on the Web in terms of total minutes of video its viewers watch.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 8:59 am under Online video, Social Media, YouTube.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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