According to comScore Video Metrix, nearly 173 million U.S. Internet users watched 32.4 billion videos in January 2010. Do the math and you’ll discover that viewers watched an average of 187 videos per viewer during the month.

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A couple of new updates from the Internet’s most popular video sharing site.

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Online Marketing Summit 2010 gets underway in San Diego this week. And Day 3 of the event features a Search Engine Strategies Forum also known as SES San Diego 2010. Here are some sneak previews.

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In abount an hour, you’ll get a chance to vote for your favorite Super Bowl 2010 commercials at YouTube’s AdBlitz Channel. But you can vote for the best pre-game YouTube videos now.

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Five years ago in February 2005, according to legend, the idea of YouTube was born after Chad Hurley and Steve Chen experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment in San Francisco.

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Would marketers be smarter to take the money they’ll spend on Super Bowl 2010 commercials and use it to by YouTube ads instead?

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Tonight, at 9pm EST, President Obama will give his second State of the Union address. For those unfamiliar with American politics, this is an annual speech given by the sitting President addressing the current state of U.S. affairs and his plan for the future.

You can catch the speech online at many sites. Here’s a list:

WhiteHouse.gov
Hulu
YouTube
Ustream (CBS coverage)
CNN
C-SPAN

What other sites are streaming the State of the Union live tonight? Leave the links in the comments section below.

Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (Global):

• January – inauguration
• February – christian bale
• March – the climb
• April – susan boyle
• May – pacquiao vs hatton
• June – michael jackson thriller
• July – michael jackson
• August – usain bolt
• September – kanye west
• October – paranormal activity
• November – bad romance
• December – tiger woods

Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (U.S.):

• January – obama inauguration
• February – on a boat
• March – watchmen
• April – susan boyle
• May – pacquiao
• June – michael jackson thriller
• July- wedding
• August – send it on
• September – kanye west
• October – paranormal activity
• November – adam lambert
• December – tiger woods

Most Watched YouTube videos (Global):

1. Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent (120+ million views)
2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)
3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)
4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)
5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)

Most Watched music videos on YouTube (Global)*:

1. Pitbull “I Know You Want Me” (82+ million views)
2. Miley Cyrus “The Climb” (64+ million views)
3. Miley Cyrus “Party in the U.S.A.” (54+ million views)
4. The Lonely Island “I’m On a Boat” (48+ million views)
5. Keri Hilson “Knock You Down” (35+ million views)

via YouTube blog

Image via Wikipedia

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

YouTube is introducing machine-generated automatic captioning to YouTube. The captions can also be translated. This obviously has incredible implications for the hearing-impaired and language translation. But it also has great implications for search.

Automatic captions will be generated using Google’s automated speech recognition (ASR) technology and the same voice recognition algorithms used in Google Voice.

Additionally, auto-timing is being introduced. If you provide all the words in the video, Google will automatically time the captioning for you.

Of course, having what essentially amounts to transcripts for online video means that the text can be crawled and indexed and then yes – SEARCHED. Bring on the keyword research and seo scriptwriting for online videos!

Google put together a video on how to access the automatic captioning and auto-timing features: