Long-form or Short-form Video? Hulu on the Rise

It may be the start of the new year but we’re still calculating the gains online video made last year. comScore has just released the online video viewing figures for November 2009 and they tell another story of records being broken at the end of a breakthrough year for online video.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the latest report.

YouTube remains the most important delivery mechanism in online video streaming over 12 billion videos in the month and helping Google to a 39.4% share of all online video watching for the month.

Far behind YouTube, but ahead of everyone else is Hulu. With a 3% share of all videos watched during the month Hulu has exceeded all industry expectation and defied the perception that online video is a short form medium.

In fact the market share percentage of almost every video property, including YouTube, has dropped since comScore’s figures of last July with the exception of Hulu.

With the average Hulu viewer watching over 2.1 hours of video in the month the average length of each online video viewed has risen to exactly 4 minutes. There are no figures about the average duration of video watched at YouTube, but this blogger believes it’s considerably less.

It may be time to start considering long form and short form video as two different verticals online as one grows and the other recedes in importance and viability for advertisers.

From the advertisers’ perspective, Tremor Media remained on top with the widest potential reach of all ad networks at just under 50% penetration, up from 42% in August. The rest of the top 10 also experience a nice bump in penetration apart from ScanScout Network who have seen their penetration drop from 50.6% last July to under 20% in November according to comScore figures. This dip follows a round of funding for ScanScout reported at $8.5 million.