Fully 62% of adult internet users have watched online video on a video-sharing website, a figure that has nearly doubled from 33% in 2006, according to a research report (pdf) from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project, which also found that 19% of online adults use video-sharing sites on a typical day (compared with 8% in 2006).
Pew noted that he use of video-sharing sites currently outranks many other online pastimes of American adults, though video viewing does not always get a proportionate amount of media attention. Watching online videos on sites such as YouTube and Google Video is more prevalent than the use of social networking sites (46% of adult internet users are active on such sites), podcast downloading (19% of internet users) and the use of microblogging tools such as Twitter (11% of internet users).