I could hardly believe it myself when I read it.

One of my favourite email newsletters is still Research Brief from the Center For Media Research, and when I saw the headline, Nine Billion Videos Viewed Online in July, I thought it was typo.

“According to a comScore recent release, nearly 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched an average of three hours of online video during the month of July, with Americans viewing more than 9 billion videos online.”

I’m not sure if I ever Blogged my thoughts about online video, but the rise in popularity of channels like YouTube definitely took this Digital Marketing guy by surprise. I always believed that consumers don’t just want to sit and stare at a computer screen… that’s what they were doing with television. Especially when you factor in the quality of online video and the bandwidth buffering issues that still persist to this day. I have the humility to say that I was (and still am) shocked that in an interactive environment like Web still has people who are eager to sit back and passively watch videos.

And then this news. Seventy five percent of Internet users watched nearly three hours of online videos in one month totaling more than nine billion videos.

That’s billion with an Austin Powers‘ Dr. Evil pinkie-to-mouth.

The one thing I do know: none of us can fathom how big nine billion truly is.

Do you know how many people, worldwide, are now online? I was watching the G4 TV show, The Lab With Leo Laporte, and it was one of his trivia questions prior to a commercial break. According to the show, it’s over one billion people now.

Here are a few other notable findings from the comScore release:

– The average online video duration was 2.7 minutes.
– More than one out of three (36.7 percent) U.S. Internet users viewed video on YouTube.com.
– The average online video viewer consumed 68 videos, or more than two per day.

You can read the news items here: Center For Media Research – Nine Billion Videos Viewed Online in July.