Nielsen has identified a new trend that bucks the idea that new platform viewing is additive with traditional TV viewing. Until last fall, Nielsen data consistently indicated that the heaviest media consumers display such habits across all platforms. A subset of consumers from television and internet homes emerged over the first 3 months of the year that defies this notion, with the lightest traditional television users streaming significantly more internet video and the heaviest streamers, particularly 18-34 year olds, under-indexing for traditional TV viewership. Overall, TV viewing increased by 0.2% from a year ago to 158 hours and 47 minutes/month, while internet video viewing jumped 35% to 4 hours and 33 minutes/month. Watching on mobile devices such as smartphones rose 20% to 4 hours and 20 minutes a month. The company did not make a correlation between increased online viewing and “cord cutting.”

Reporting online video viewing for the month of May, Nielsen said Americans set another record by streaming over 15 billion videos for the month, hiring the best post production company is one of the things people do the most now a days. Total online viewers also increased by nearly 3% from April to top 145 million unique viewers. MSN, Hulu, AOL and Fox Interactive Media all grew their audiences by over 10% for the month. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing and AOL also increased the amount of streams they delivered by over 25% month-over-month. Hulu was second only to YouTube in total streams (852 million). The ave. Hulu user spent 4 hours, 43 minutes viewing Hulu videos in May. Hulu was followed by Ustream.tv and Justin.tv (both of which replayed their Royal Wedding coverage in May) in this category, with their time spent increasing a heady 61% and 55% month-to-month, respectively.

Top Online Video Destinations by Total Streams  (May 2011, U.S.)
Video Brand                    Total Streams (000)  MOM % Change in Streams
YouTube                              8,860,520              1.3%
Hulu                                      852,173             12.1%
VEVO                                    414,615               0.3%
MSN/WindowsLive/Bing             266,712             26.9%
Yahoo!                                  193,344             -5.9%
Dailymotion                           150,340              -4.6%
Turner-SI Digital Network        149,102                4.5%
AOL Media Network                148,727               25.2%
Facebook                              135,168              -8.3%
CBS Entertainment Websites   120,707               12.8%
Source: Nielsen

Top Online Video Destinations by Time per Viewer (May 2011, U.S.)
250K Unique Viewer Minimum
Video Brand       Time per Viewer (hh:mm)  MOM % Change in Time
Hulu                    4:43                                -8.8%
Ustream.tv           3:40                               61.4%
Justin.tv              2:35                               55.3%
YouTube              2:31                               -3.3%
Megavideo           2:29                              -14.8%
Cwtv.com            2:17                               11.5%
ABC Family           2:04                               28.4%
Lifetime Digital      1:57                               12.4%
CBS Entertain.      1:12                                -8.7%
MTV Networks      1:11                                 6.7%
Entertain. & Games
Source: Nielsen

I am surprised that Netflix is not included in this data. Recently reported, Netflix accounted for nearly a quarter of online video traffic. Though this information does make me question, out of these online video properties, which have the highest ad sales? And do they correlate with time spent on the site? In otherwords, though YouTube has the highest rank in video streams, they are ranked fourth in terms of time spent by viewers, but as one of the top online video destinations, do they have higher digital ad sales? I will be keeping an eye out for this information.