April 29, 2009

She is the British singer who burst onto the world stage a couple of weeks ago after her stirring appearance on a talent TV show.  Video clips of her performance have been viewed over 100 million times in the short period since her performance.

Boyle’s online success highlights the continued rapid growth of online video and indicates that online video usage is a mainstream online activity.

This is a trend we’ve been tracking for years.  And for years we have underestimated how fast it is growing.

According to a recent report by the marketing research firm Nielsen, the number of Americans watching online video has more than tripled in the last 5 years.

Over the last year alone, viewers of online video grew 10%, the number of videos watched per user grew 27% and the total numbers of minutes spent watching online video grew 71%.

Online video is not just for entertainment.  It is increasingly being used for marketing and customer service applications.  And because of low cost digital video cameras, easy to use video editing software and distribution tools, online video is easy and inexpensive to produce.   Even the smallest of businesses can afford adding video to their websites.

With broadband speeds continuing to increase, we expect online video usage to continue to grow.  With online video now mainstream, small businesses need to evaluate its use for marketing and customer service.

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About the Author: Steve King is a partner at Emergent Research, a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, and senior fellow at the Society for New Communications Research. He is a co-author of the Intuit Future of Small Business report series, and he blogs at Small Biz Labs.