3 of 4 New Zealanders watch online video

US online audience tracking company Comscore has released its latest study of online video viewing habits in New Zealand based on data from its Video Metrix service, which was launched here earlier this year.

Over the month, 2.1 million Internet users age 15 and older (77% of the online population) watched a total of 157.3 million online videos from a home or work location with an average viewer watching 73 videos during the month, according to the survey.

It seems New Zealanders watch no video porn, or if they do, no one single adult site garners enough traffic to make the top 10.

Back on the main survey, Google sites (which include YouTube) easily led the pack.

But TVNZ and MediaWorks (TV3, Four), which both offer ondemand online versions of most of their programming, rated a respectable 201,000 and 149,000 viewers.

So online video's hot, right?

Not necessarily. Fairfax's New Zealand sites - led by the flagship Stuff - have used auto-loading video intermittently, notably during the Pike River and Christchurch Earthquake disasters.

Over the Tasman, Fairfax sites The Sydney Morning Herald, The Melbourne Age and others have used auto-loading video more enthusiastically.

But according to a report in The Australian (owned by rival News Ltd) earlier this week, Fairfax plans to abandon auto-loading videos after reader backlash led to an advertiser boycott (and certainly in New Zealand, land of so-so broadband, it can be annoying when a slow-to-load video is prefixed by a 30-second video ad, or "bumper", further drawing out the process. Google has ditched bumpers in favour of text over-lay ads and sponsor banners on YouTube. Clever people).

Comscore also found that young(ish) males were most likely to watch videos online. But overall it was a fairly even demographic spread:

NBR staff
Wed, 06 Apr 2011

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3 of 4 New Zealanders watch online video