amazon instant

Amazon Breaks Into Online Video Top 10

Frederic Lardinois

Jul 15, 2011 — 1 min read

When it comes to online video, YouTube has remained the #1 destination for U.S. Internet users for a long time now. There has always been some volatility in the lower ranks of the top 10 of online video destinations in the U.S., however, where Facebook and Hulu have been slowly moving up the ranks and organizations like NBC Universal and others have been struggling to hold on to their top 10 ranking. According to the latest data from comScore’s Video Metrix service, Amazon has now entered comScore’s list of top 10 online video sites for the first time.

Amazon is definitely the smallest of the top 10 sites by far, though. Hulu is in ninth position with 157 million viewing sessions and 26 million viewers, while Amazon only served up 43 million viewing sessions to a (still respectable) 21 million unique viewers.

Driven by Product Videos, Not Instant Video

What’s really interesting about Amazon’s statistics is the low number of minutes users spend on the site. On average, users just watch 8.3 minutes of video there per month. Even on Facebook, which ranks ninth in terms of minutes watched per viewer, users watch about 21 minutes of video per month.

Clearly then, Amazon’s numbers are driven more by short product videos than by its Hulu and Netflix challenger Instant Video, though the number likely represents a mix of all of Amazon’s video products. While this doesn’t bode too well for Instant Video, it does show the power of having product videos on an e-commerce site. I’ve asked comScore for some clarification about Amazon’s numbers and the ratio between Instant Video and product video views and will update this post once I hear back from them.

Below is the full comScore top 10 for June 2011:

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