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Half of Internet Users Watch Online Video Every Week

Ryan Lawler — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:50:37 +0000

More Internet users are tuning in to online video regularly, with half of all viewers watching video online each week, according to a survey conducted by Frank N. Magid Associates for Metacafe. That’s up from 43 percent of users who watched online video weekly in the previous year.

Most of that growth comes from younger users, as 85 percent of males aged 18-24 and two-thirds of all respondents aged 18-34 said they watched online video weekly. As the behavior becomes even more mainstream, Magid estimates that the amount of time viewers spend watching video online will increase by about 5 percent over the next year.

There’s evidence that users are becoming more interested in viewing online video in the same way that they watch TV. About 38 percent of online video viewers say they are interested or very interested in connecting a computer to their TV to watch online video. And while short-form video still rules, whether it be user-generated clips, movie trailers or clips of TV or movie content, about 76 percent of those who watch video online say they are tuning in to professionally produced content regularly.

But online video viewers, for the most part, say their over-the-top video habit is not interfering with their normal TV watching. Only 14 percent of users said they watched less TV due to watching content online. About 72 percent said they watched the same amount of TV despite also watching video online — and another 10 percent said they watched more TV.

One of the big questions about online video is the consumer tolerance of online video ads, particularly as more ad dollars are entering the segment and video publishers seek to monetize their video assets. According to the survey, 48 percent of respondents said they found ads online to be as acceptable as those in TV shows — and 7 percent said online video ads were more acceptable.

Photo courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) Flickr user tnarik.

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12% of Americans Bought Virtual Goods in Past 12 Months: Survey

Wagner James Au — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:00:32 +0000

Roughly 12 percent of Americans, or more than one in 10, have bought a virtual item at some point in the last 12 months, according to a new study by analyst firm Frank N. Magid Associates and commissioned by virtual currency provider PlaySpan. With the virtual goods and currency market estimated to reach $1.8 billion this year, the Magid study offers some insight into exactly who’s doing the buying, and where.
Demographically, for example, while 15 percent of males aged 12-24 reported purchasing virtual goods, 15 percent of women between ages 35-44 did so, too. As Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors, put it to me, the boys are getting virtual swords for their MMORPGs, while the women are buying virtual flowers on Facebook. Vorhaus noted that categorization by ethnicity was also diverse, with Asian-Americans on the high end (16 percent), and the rest some 1-5 percent behind.

Segmenting that 12 percent according to consumers’ Internet activity and device ownership, social network gamers and iPhone owners are strongly represented (27 and 28 percent, respectively); PC and handheld console gamers were almost as likely to buy virtual items (between 19 and 22 percent.) However, active console gamers lag just a bit behind those segments.

Unsurprisingly, the most significant variable in purchase rate is virtual world usage: Nearly half of the respondents who report being active MMO participants are also virtual item consumers. (The key challenge for virtual world developers is figuring out how to monetize the other half, something I cover in my recent GigaOM Pro report, subscription required.)

Meanwhile, Eric Hartness, chief marketing officer at PlaySpan, told me he expects that by this time next year, that 12 percent figure will rise to 15-18 percent.

All charts and data courtesy Frank N. Magid Associates and PlaySpan.

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Studies Say Web Video Usage Overstated, P2P Users Buy More DVDs

Liz Gannes — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:58:10 +0000

Two research reports have just been released that aim to dispel two commonly held media consumption assumptions: one, that online video usage is pervasive, and two, that P2P users steal all the content they consume.

First up, a $3.5 million study (we had previously reported on it here) that directly observed people’s daily media consumption habits found that people watch far more TV and far more online and mobile video than they say they do.

The study, conducted by Sequenth Partners and Ball State University and funded by Nielsen, confirmed Nielsen’s earlier finding that 99 percent of video consumption happens on a TV screen. It also looked at other types of video consumption such as displays in stores and GPS navigators.

One of the researchers attributed the differences between people’s stated behavior and their observed behavior to both how they don’t want to admit how much TV they actually watch and how they do want to associate themselves with “new and cool” video consumption via the web and mobile phones.

Another — much smaller, and corporate-sponsored — study found that P2P users buy a ton of offline content. Users of P2P software from Vuze, which commissioned the study by Frank Magid Associates, buy more movie tickets and DVDs and rent more movies that the general Internet population. The study did not look at online content purchases by P2P users, because Vuze said its users hate DRM and high digital prices, according to Ars Technica. Who knows, maybe they’re all just buying DVDs to rip and seed on BitTorrent? (Just kidding.)

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