Total Online Video Streams Viewed Up 17% in November

The Nielsen Company reported yesterday that total video streams for November 2009 were up 17 percent year-over-year in the U.S.

There were 138.4 million unique viewers of online video that month. They watched 11.2 billion video streams, or about 81 streams per viewer. Viewers spent 200 minutes per viewer — on average — watching online video.

Not surprisingly, YouTube was the top online brand ranked by video streams for November 2009 in the U.S. 106.9 million unique visitors watched 6.8 billion streams on YouTube that month. Hulu ranked second, with 12.5 million unique visitors, who watched 656.6 million streams. That’s not a typo. YouTube dominates the category by that much.

I should disclose that I’ve been out promoting online video usage in general and YouTube in particular. But I’m not alone.

At SES Chicago 2009, Jamie ODonnell of SEO-PR interviewed Topher Kohan, SEO Coordinator for CNN.com, about how to get your videos in the top rankings of search engines.

In 2009, Google announced it would begin using Facebook Share and Yahoo SearchMonkey to make it easier to share and index your video content. Kohan says its all about submitting your video content via XML sitemaps and Media RSS feeds. And the way to get search engines to integrate your video content is by wrapping your videos in some kind of micro format tags and letting the indexes know about it.

Kohan believes that in the next 18 months Google and Yahoo will offer standardized open source set of tags. He also discussed the benefits of using Facebook Share, primarily because it lets you know where your content goes once it leaves your site. When you sign up to be a Facebook developer, you can access reports that show you where your video is being embedded, how many views it is getting.

Check it out.

How to optimize your videos with Topher Kohan, CNN at SES Chicago 2009