Research firm comScore published its final monthly US Online Video Rankings data for 2013 yesterday, which means we can draw some conclusions about how the year went for music video service Vevo, as well as Google’s YouTube.
The big number for Vevo is 7.2bn – that’s the number of video views tracked by comScore for 2013 as a whole, as the service averaged around 603m monthly views in the US over the 12-month period.
Interesting trends include the number of average monthly minutes per viewer rising steadily over the year from 38.6 minutes in January to 51 minutes in December. Of more concern may be the fact that according to comScore’s stats, Vevo’s unique US viewers spent most of the year between 49m and 52m, before falling to 43.7m in November than 39.4m in December.
Worth remembering: as we calculated last year, comScore stats don’t include more than 30% of Vevo’s self-reported video views: those on smartphones, tablets and connected TVs.
We’ve totted up comScore’s stats from 2012 to gauge Vevo’s year-on-year growth: its charts for that year claim 7.6bn US views for Vevo across the year – again, this is web-only – so the 5% year-on-year drop is likely to be more than made up for by the (for now) unknown rise in mobile/tablet/TV views.
We’d expect Vevo to be coming out with some stats in the coming weeks to show its growth in 2013, which will give us a fuller picture.
What of YouTube? comScore tracked 175.2bn YouTube video views in the US in 2013, with monthly viewers peaking at 167.9m in July, before ending the year at 159.1m. July was also the peak for average minutes per viewer – 544 minutes – while the annual video views total dropped 7.2% from 188.8bn in 2012.
That could be a sign of a shift towards more longform content on Google’s video service. Again, mobile is missing from the figures, and with YouTube saying that nearly 40% of its global watch time now comes from mobile devices, that’s a lot of views.
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