Nielsen: People Watching Less YouTube, Less Video, But More Hulu

Michael Learmonth | June 20, 2008 9:36 AM

homer-simpson.jpgDid TV get a lot better last month? Or was it the weather? Whatever it was, something prompted Americans to consume a little less online video in May, according to Nielsen Online.

Nielsen's Video Census says overall online video  use fell about 2% from April to May. It also says video giant YouTube saw its usage, measured by total number of video streams, drop just a sliver, from 4 billion to 3.8 billion. Those two stats should move in tandem, since YouTube now accounts for more than half of American's video diet.

But not everything moved in lockstep. Hulu, the joint venture between NBC U and Fox, saw usage grow from 63 million video streams in April to 80 million in May, a 27% jump. Unique users grew 13%, indicating that Hulu watchers are spending more time on the site. Since its launch in mid-March, Hulu has climbed to No. 9 among video sites, ahead of ABC.com (79.9 m streams) and behind CNN (89.7 m). Meanwhile News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media, the second most popular video provider, can take some solace that it closed the chasm, at least a little. While YouTube dropped off, No. 2 FIM held steady at 328 million video streams.

mayvideocensus.jpg

See Also:
Hulu Breaks Into Nielsen's Top-10 Video Sites, Knocks Out Google Video
YouTube Shifts Strategy, Tries Long-Form Video
Study: Videos Live Fast, Die Young On Web
Why ISPs Want To Charge Bandwidth Hogs More Now: Web Video Traffic About To Explode

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33 Comments

hehateme said:
These web stats are so bogus.
Davis Freeberg (URL) said:
I agree with hehateme. These stats are complete BS. How can Nielsen say that demand for web video is declining when they don't even list some of the top video sites on the net. There's no Veoh, no Break.com, no Vimeo? When Veoh announced their funding last month they said that they were getting 28 million UNIQUES per month. This is more than TEN TIMES MORE traffic then what Nielsen is reporting for Hulu and yet their is no mention of Veoh on the list. Even with after building a fancy media cartel for their programming, they still can't attract the same number of visitors as the independent sites. Talk about an epic fail.

Either Veoh is lying or Nielsen is intentionally manipulating their statistics in order to trick people like SAI into mis-reporting that their customer's sites are doing better then they really are. I think SAI got snowballed on this one.

It's not demand for online video that is slowing, it's the demand for big media's weak DRM tainted products that is slowing down.
geraldz (URL) said:
I think Veoh, etc. are just aggregators. They scour the web and embed videos into their sites. So the stream count would be at the source (YouTube, Hulu, etc.), not the site where its embedded. Just my guess.

JASON JENKINS LIVE! (URL) said:
no veoh is not an aggregator, you can upload directly to their site. also these numbers are a complete joke because they do not include peer 2 peer file sharing video views. if you could track that number then you would see that web video is growing daily! for online urban video content see videostomp.com
Davis: these are not hits, they are video streams. Big difference. Nielsen's measurement is flawed--like all media measurement. Obviously, it only works accurately for sites that allow their servers to be tagged and monitored directly. I'm told Veoh is now doing so, so they should be getting an accurate measurement from Nielsen.

Right now, Nielsen and ComScore are the only games in town for independent measuring of video streams on the Web. They're not perfect, but they allow for apples-to-apples comparisons, and a good directional sense for where the viewers are going.

BTW--the 7.4 billion streams is all sites, not just the top-10.
How many uniques does Nielsen say Veoh has?
Davis Freeberg (URL) said:
@Michael I don't have any complaints about the quality of data. With any survey there will always be weaknesses, I can accept that and take the results with a grain of salt. My complaint is really about the integrity of their top ten list.

It really comes down to the fuzziness surrounding the methodology for being included as a Nielsen top 10 video site. If this methodology requires that you have to get the most hits out of all online video sites, then the differences in Nielsen's traffic data can be explained away by looking at subtleties like streaming vs. unique visitors or at the quality of the data collected compared to other services. If this is the reason why sites like Break.com and Veoh don't show up then I have no complaints.

If you have to be a client of Nielsens in order to be included in their top ten list then I do have a beef over how Nielsen is misleading journalists and readers with this data.

Every month Nielsen dumps this data out there, but they never explain the criteria for how they determine whether a site is on their top ten list. If their own data shows that sites like Veoh are actually getting more streams per month, but then they leave that data off because they don't pay money to Nielsen, then how can we extrapolate any useful information from these stats. In your post you use this data to comment on the larger online video market place, but what if the larger online market is really growing? Is it fair to to say that all online video is slowing, when really it's only the Hollywood hits. Why doesn't Nielsen provide you with the traffic breakdown for Veoh and Break.com and we can see for ourselves whether they are doing more streams then the mainstream media sites?

When I tried to find out more about Nielsen's methodology for inclusion on their list, all that I could find was this disturbing passage from their about page for PR professionals.

"Public relations agencies may use Nielsen Online data as specified in General Guidelines. However, they may not republish the data in press releases/announcements on behalf of their clients unless the client is already a Nielsen Online subscriber"

http://www.netratings.com/downloads/PR_guidelines_0806.pdf

Given the lack of clarity around their data, I think that you owe it to your readers to properly report what the Nielsen top 10 is really measuring. Off the top of my head, I know that it doesn't represent the larger online market because Nielsen only looks at the US data, yet that's not mentioned anywhere in your post or in Nielsen's data. Nor is the conflict of interest ever discussed. Nielsen may be one of the few companies that are putting out this data, but it dishonest to customize a survey for paying customers and then imply that it's a non-biased look at the market.
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