The Times They Are a Changing: Online Video Viewership on the Rise

Author: Janet Wise, Primary Research Director

Published: 16 Jun 2009

During a recent dinnertime conversation with my kids, I was regaling (or maybe horrifying) them with examples of how technology has changed since I was a child. One of my children was fascinated when I explained that in the pre-iPod or even (gasp) pre-CD days, people who wanted to listen to music played vinyl records on something called a turntable. And another couldn’t get over the fact that when I was growing up, we didn’t have the Internet or laptop PCs: “No way--you’re kidding! You didn’t have a laptop? And you didn’t watch Smosh on YouTube?” Now, I’m pretty sure that my kids haven’t known about YouTube, much less Smosh, for more than a couple of years, and yet they can’t imagine a time when they and everyone else didn’t. In light of this conversation, I found myself thinking that watching videos online, whether YouTube clips or recent TV episodes, is a relatively recent phenomenon, and that not too long ago, comparatively few people in the U.S. watched videos online. So I wondered: How quickly can we see changes in behaviors around relatively new technologies, such as viewing videos over the Internet?

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