9 BILLION SERVED!

No, I’m not talking about hamburgers. Amazingly…shockingly…perhaps even incomprehensibly, I’m talking about video downloads. 9 billion is the number of videos viewed online in a SINGLE month. According to a recent release by comScore, nearly 75% of U.S. Internet users watched an average of three hours of online video during the month of July 2007, with Americans viewing more than 9 billion videos total.

9 Billion downloads in a single month is a staggering number. The statistics further reveal that nearly 3 out of 4 internet users viewed videos – each with an average duration of 2.7 minutes. The average online video viewer watched more than 68 videos in a month, or just slightly more than two per day.

And although I knew video was incredibly popular online, I was really quite surprised by this figure. I wonder how much of it is attributable to the new Google Universal Search and other “blended search” results arising in the popular search engines. The unprecedented access to videos in search results may be the cause.