Video Viewing Takes Off, Says Study

"Over the past year, the amount of time American audiences spent watching video for the major live video publishers has grown 648% to more than 1.4 billion minutes, according to comScore." That's the word from MediaPost. 

Keep this in mind when you read Nick Bilton's New York Times blog. Here's a piece of his blog:

Facebook’s half a billion users were uploading "20 million videos each month, many of which are shared through mobile phones." These same users were consuming more than 30 billion videos online each month.

As Josh Wiseman, an engineering manager at Facebook, explained when I discussed these staggering numbers with him, these videos are primarily user-generated, illustrated by the fact that they are uploaded from a mobile phone. In other words, they are the “amateur hour” Mr. Jobs said customers don’t want.

If we look beyond Facebook, research from ComScore found that 135 million Web surfers are consuming 13 billion videos on YouTube each month. Although the report didn’t break down the amateur-vs.-professional split of those videos, vast numbers of YouTube’s videos are not from professional sources.

The rating/research company Nielsen uncovered this information: "Americans spend nearly a quarter of their time online on social networking sites and blogs, up from 15.8 percent just a year ago (43 percent increase)...Americans spend a third their online time (36 percent) communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging." That does not include time spent surfing websites, watching tv, or playing video games.