Nielsen: Vid Viewers Down, Vid Views Up

Nielsen today released its March VideoCensus numbers, saying it saw a slight decrease in U.S. unique video viewers — to 115.4 million, down from 115.8 million in February and 116.7 million in January. Total video streams, on the other hand, got a healthy boost, rising to 6.968 billion from 6.333 billion in February and 5.987 billion in January. We’ve asked the firm for analysis of the divergent trends but haven’t heard back yet.

The leaderboard remained mostly the same, with Google Video dropping a few notches and CNN replacing its sibling AOL. Check out our homemade chart for the distribution in lots of pretty colors. Also, if you see another totally different version of the March numbers reported elsewhere, don’t fret about the crazy pills; Nielsen issued a correction to its initial release that completely revised the video streams portion.

Nielsen said the number of streams per viewer climbed to 60.4 in March, and time per viewer rose as well, to 137.3 minutes.

Nielsen competitor comScore hasn’t released stats for March yet, but you can see our analysis of its February numbers.