Before you read further, answer this question. How many You Tube, Yahoo or Facebook videos did you post in July?

Why is that important? Because in July 2010, 178 million Internet users in the US watched online video content, an average of 14.7 hours per viewer.

comScore, the people that measure things on the web, released the latest figures this week, and as expected online video use continues to climb. Certainly being fueled by web enabled smartphones and e-readers. People just have more options now to get to the web than ever before.

Online video continues to be driven by Google sites, like You Tube, ranked #1 with 143.2 million unique viewers. Yahoo is a distant second with 55 million unique viewers. But here is the real headline. Facebook is now the third largest online video site, jumping Microsoft in the last 30 days.

Facebook, the social network phenom, continues to gain users – now with over 500 million and 50% of them log on every single day. Facebook videos are those that are usually shot and uploaded among friends, not links out to other sites.

We have suggested for years the need for stations to get onboard the online video train. It is a great way to market and reaches audiences that are potentially not watching daily newscasts, but still need and want to stay connected. Reaching out to them beyond the set, bringing them into your social camp, builds loyal viewers and online users.

There are several ways to do this efficiently. Building a YouTube channel gets you in front of the worlds second largest search engine, supplies links to post to your Facebook page and can generate revenue with partner accounts. You kill two birds with one stone with this method, getting your content in from of two of the top three online video sites.

WCMH-TV in Columbus, OH is a good example of a station that has adopted a You Tube strategy.

Ike Walker is the Director of Digital Journalism at WCMH. “Everyone in the newsroom is responsible for processing video, getting it to the sever that can feed the multiple sites. We post when we get it.. we moved to a web first mentality, very rarely is there an occasion that we say we will hold the story until 6PM. We are training everyone in the newsroom to post.”

Walker tells me their goal is to make sure they aren’t just regurgitating content from the broadcast, ” We are trying to make sure everything we are doing is in addition to our regular broadcast.”

Posting to your own site and linking to Facebook works too. It drives views back to your website and still gets you in front of a huge Facebook audience.

Either way, there should be a daily plan of moving content to these valuable platforms. I hear almost weekly from stations asking what other platforms are my viewers on and how do I reach them? 178 million online video users is a really good start.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.