Time Spent Watching Video Jumps 40% in One Year
One way to think about online video is to consider how big a chunk it takes out of our daily lives. The amount of time U.S. Internet users spend watching video is up an impressive 40 percent year over year.
Context & Ripple Effects
By early 2009, online video had already crossed the adoption threshold — three out of four U.S. Internet users streamed video by mid-2007 — but the open question was whether it would become a habit or a novelty. This 40% jump in time spent watching answers that: attention, not just reach, is shifting to the screen inside the browser.
First-order effects
- U.S. Internet users are now devoting a materially larger share of their day to online video, converting casual streamers into habitual viewers and expanding the pool of monetizable ad impressions for video platforms.
Second-order effects
- Broadcasters and content owners face growing pressure to put more programming online as watch time migrates, while networks and CDNs must scale delivery capacity — a demand signal later reflected in forecasts that video would dominate U.S. internet traffic (Cisco projected 84% by 2018).
Third-order effects
- If the compounding growth holds, online video stops being a complement to television and becomes the primary consumption surface — the trajectory that runs through YouTube's billion-hours-a-day milestone ([[a:916919]]) and Nielsen's finding that U.S. adults now average nearly six hours of daily video across all screens ([[a:932045]]).
The trend: This is an early data point in the decade-long migration of video attention from broadcast schedules to on-demand, internet-delivered viewing across every screen.