The Rising Popularity of Online Video News

Watching video online is becoming increasingly popular and news is the most popular topic, according to a study (PDF format) released today by the Online Publishers Association.

Twenty-seven percent of 27,841 Internet users polled on 25 OPA member organizations’ websites said that they view online video at least once per week and 5 percent said they view it daily. A majority (51 percent) watch video online at least once per month.

News was the most popular (66 percent) video topic, followed in popularity by film clips or trailers (49 percent), music videos (29 percent), and sports videos (27 percent). The study doesn’t mention that 14 of the 25 OPA websites on which the users were polled are devoted to general news, business news, and sports news, so some of these percentages might be self-selecting.

The OPA study found a gender skew among online video viewers: 63 percent of online video viewers were male, compared to only 49 percent of all the Internet users. (I wonder how much of that 14-percent difference was simply due to the availability of sports videos, which generally are more popular among men than women.) The OPA study noted that sports videos were also the most frequently watched form of content, viewed slightly more frequently and much longer than news videos.

Seventy percent of the Internet users had seen a video advertisement online. Remarkably, 44 percent of them (31 percent of the total) said they took some positive action (such viewing a product website, going to a story, or purchasing) as a result of seeing the ad.