Vevo viewers down 20% year-to-year

Music video platform Vevo, which had been one of the fastest growing video properties on the Internet, is witnessing a steep viewership drop, at least on the web.

According to numbers released Monday by Internet usage tracker comScore, Vevo’s unique viewers in the U.S. during May dropped 20 percent from the same period last year, from 60.4 million to around 48.3 million.

Meanwhile, the average number of minutes each viewer spent watching Vevo videos in May declined 26 percent over the same period, from 105.1 to 77.7.

The online music platform, jointly launched in December 2009 by Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Abu Dhabi Media, had been on a meteoric rise, with unique viewers growing 44 percent from June 2010 to June 2011.

So what’s going on?

Also read: What a Facebook deal with Vevo could unleash

Reached by paidContent, a Vevo representative would not speculate on the cause of the steep viewer drop.

A report issued by the company in May, however, acknowledged a first-quarter viewership decline, attributing that to “seasonal decrease of blockbuster music programming released by record companies compared with other times of the year.”

Through May, however, Vevo’s Q2 viewership has been even worse, down from an average of 51.6 million users per month in Q1 to 48.9 million.

That same report seemed to indicate that some of Vevo’s audience is migrating to mobile platforms, with comScore not measuring what gets seen through the companies mobile apps.

From December through May, monthly viewership on what has been Vevo’s core channel, YouTube, dropped from 53.5 million to 48.3 million. However, the company said it saw a 26 percent spike in mobile video streams from January to March.

The comScore metrics also don’t reflect performance in other territories where Vevo operates, such as Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

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