95 Videos Viewed Online by Every Man Woman and Child

Recently I created an online video to provide an Internet Marketing Overview targeting small to medium sized business.

View Video on YouTube: Internet Marketing Overview for SMBs

Then after uploading the video to a few more sites, it dawned on me that Internet Marketing is going to be heavily driven by video this year. Video usage and sharing has never been more popular and easy than it is today and near real time indexing of video content by the large search engines is now common. Its no wonder given that the large search engines all have their own video acquisitions, Google with YouTube, Yahoo with Flickr, etc.

You know the old expression, a picture is worth a thousand words, then how many words is a video worth, a million perhaps? A recent headline on marketingcharts.com indicated that according to the comScore Video Metrix service, US internet users watched 32.4 billion videos in January 2010. That’s mind blowing!

Thinking about further, with an estimated US population of just about 341M according to Internet World Stats, the 32.4B videos viewed in Jan 2010, means that on average, each man/woman/child in the US watched 95 videos online in January. If your target market is online and wired into social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, their video consumption in January was likely much higher than 95 given the very young (to young to use the computer) and the very old (nursing home old) are likely not watching any videos and thus driving the average video consumption number down.

It is my strong belief that this phenomena has been accelerated/enabled by popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr which have made sharing videos with large numbers of people incredibly easy. therefore mainstream. Since major search engines with large video content assets routinely index video content quickly and return links to videos in blended search results, video not only continues to represent a great branding opportunity, but also a useful tool to obtain natural search results for competitive keywords.

Convinced? The time for integrating video into your Internet marketing efforts have never been better. Remember, a video could be worth a million words and that by April, maybe users will averaging over 100 online video views per month!