US online viewing reached a record 157 million viewers in June thanks to major news stories including the death of Michael Jackson and controversial Iranian elections, according to the latest research published by comScore.
The surge in video viewing was primarily attributable to significant news stories that occurred in June, including Michael Jackson’s death and the Iranian elections, which generated sizeable gains particularly for major media properties such as Viacom Digital (including MTV), Microsoft Sites (includes MSNBC) and Turner Network (including CNN).
In June, Google Sites once again ranked as the top US video property with 7.6 billion videos viewed, with YouTube.com accounting for more than 99% of all videos watched. Viacom Digital ranked second with 774 million videos (4.0% of the online video market), followed by Microsoft Sites with 696 million (3.6%) and Blinkx with 623 million videos viewed (3.2%).
More than 157 million viewers watched an average of 124 videos during the month of June. Google surpassed its all time high with more than 112 million unique viewers during the month, followed by Microsoft Sites with 73 million viewers (9.5 videos per viewer) and Fox Interactive Media with 59 million viewers (10.1 videos per viewer).
Other notable findings from June 2009 include: 81.2% of the total US internet audience viewed online video; the average online video viewer watched 453 minutes of video, or nearly 7.6 hours; 111.8 million viewers watched 7.6 billion videos on YouTube.com (67.9 videos per viewer); 53.6 million viewers watched 524 million videos on MySpace.com (9.8 videos per viewer). The average visitor to Hulu watched 10.1 videos, totalling more than an hour of videos per visitor. The duration of the average online video was 3.7 minutes.
