Sometimes watching videos on the go via a mobile device is just convenient. Flipping over to YouTube and/or Facebook and clicking a play button makes it easy for people to stay informed with a variety of video content. And, according to a new report from eMarketer, it’s definitely getting more popular.
With results gathered from Ooyala for the first quarter of 2015, eMarketer reports that 34 percent of digital video views worldwide managed to come from mobile phones, versus seven percent coming from tablets. That shows a tremendous amount of growth in a year’s time, with a increase of 126.7 percent of digital video views overall — a 95.2 percent increase year over year, from 21 percent to 41 percent.
As for what type of videos are preferred, users seem to go for the short-form content clips. Ooyala reports that videos that ran for under three minutes managed to make up nearly half the time spent watching video on mobile phones overall. By comparison, nearly 60 percent of time spent with tablet video manages to go a little longer, at least over ten minutes.
On Device Research, working on behalf of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, held a poll as well, asking smartphone video viewers about how often they watched short-form videos and longer ones. 57 percent of those polled indicated that they watch content that runs five minutes or shorter throughout the day, while 35 percent prefer longer-content videos.
According to these results, a lot of these viewers are also willing to sit through ads to get to their content, in an effort to save a few dollars for a premium subscription service. The IAB reported that 78 of respondents would prefer to watch free mobile videos with ads, versus the 15 percent who said they’d pay for a monthly mobile video subscription to skip the ads. Meanwhile, eight percent said they’d pay for separate video views, without any ads.
One more interesting statistic from FreeWheel indicates that 17 percent of digital video ad views in the U.S. were on smartphones, while only eight percent were on tablets. That may be something of note to advertisers, though, as you can see from the stats above, several folks are still willing to sit through ads to get to their beloved content.
The full report can be found here.