YouTube Attracts 100 Million U.S. Online Video Viewers in October 2008

YouTube Attracts 100 Million U.S. Online Video Viewers in October 2008

The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC discusses some under reported “Holy Mackerel” stories each evening. Well, I’d like to share a “Holy Mackerel” story from SES Chicago 2008.

I’m one of the speakers at the Video Search Engine Optimization session on Wednesday, Dec. 10, from 12:45 to 2:00 p.m. And tonight, I did a double-check to see if there was any last-minute news about online video that I should be aware of before tomorrow’s panel.

And I read this: “YouTube Attracts 100 Million U.S. Online Video Viewers in October 2008.” Holy Mackerel!

Here are the details: According to comScore Video Metrix, more than 147 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 92 videos per viewer in October. Google Sites attracted a record 100 million online video viewers, or more than two out of every three Internet users who watched video during the month. This means that Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property with nearly 5.4 billion videos viewed, with YouTube.com accounting for more than 98% of all videos viewed at the property.

Specifically, 99.5 million viewers watched 5.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (53.2 videos per viewer).

But, YouTube isn’t a video search engine. It is a video sharing site. Which means that YouTube doesn’t crawl the videos on your website. You need to upload your videos to YouTube in order for them to be found when someone conducts a “YouTube Search.”

Fortunately, I have a YouTube case study to present at tomorrow’s session. It’s a follow-on story that I shared at SES San Jose on a similar panel. Li Evans of KeyRelevance interviewed me after that session a couple of months ago. So, you can see that this “Holy Mackerel” story has been told before.

VSEO - Video Search Engine Optimization - with Greg Jarboe

Still, I can’t tell you how many times people ask me how to optimize video for Google Video. Ummm. How do I say this? If YouTube is accounting for more than 98% of all videos viewed at Google Sites, then Google Video accounts for less than 2%. Right?

So, video search engine optimization appears to be round-off error. What is more important is optimizing video for YouTube. That’s what I plan to talk about tomorrow. It may be a little surprising. But no more surprising than the latest data from comScore.