• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, February 19, 2014

It would be hard to deny that the Vevo online music video service isn’t sitting pretty as mobile and table mobile viewership increases by leaps and bounds, literally month by month. Some new stats from Vevo bear that out.  

In its new U.S. Music Video Viewership Report, just released, Vevo says that mobile, tablet and connected TV views increased by a brilliant 118% over the year before, which would be awesome all by itself but worldwide, viewership on those devices rocketed up 176%.

Vevo’s experience is consistent with everything else that’s been reported in the last six months or so. Oooyala reported earlier that according to its Global Video Index, there’s been a 133% increase in mobile viewing over the last year, though it also pointed out that people are also watching longer and longer videos on those devices.

Indeed, Re/Code reports today that “the assumption that mobile viewing is focused on short content is passé. During the third quarter of 2013, tablet owners spent more than 25% of their viewing time watching videos more than 60 minutes long. Device improvements, including bigger and better screens, as well as faster processors and connectivity, have created the backdrop for mobile viewers to watch longer videos, which in turn, creates a new opportunity for content providers to engage audiences.”

Which means, of course, that users still spend 75% of their time watching shorter videos. Assuming smartphones and tablets have at least another year of rapid growth before everybody who’s going to have one will already have one, Vevo and YouTube wouldn’t need to worry too much about a trend toward longer videos. While people are using them to watch longer videos, they’re also just using mobile and tablets to watch videos of some length.  

Vevo says 60% of its total monthly views came from mobile, tablets or connected devices last year.

Then there’s the other thing: Vevo shows music videos, a most resilient entertainment form and while there are lots of places to find them, Vevo is arguably the go-to provider. 

If there’s a big, big lesson from the Vevo report, it is that there may not have been a more brilliant marketing campaign in 2013 than the one concocted for Miley Cyrus. She had the most viewed music videos of 2013, though Pink’s (and Nate Reuss’s) “Just Give Me A Reason” was the most shared on Vevo.

Cyrus appeared naked (but mainly unexposed) in “Wrecking Ball,” that premiered shortly after her twerking episode on MTV. Nice going. That video got 19.3 million views in one day on Vevo, a record, and was the fastest to reach 100 million views—just six days.

pj@mediapost.com