The proliferation of video across the site, from the President’s weekly video address to video segments on the site’s blog, has helped spur this impressive growth. Unique viewers of video content increased 236 percent month-over-month, growing from 75,000 in February to 252,000 in March 2009, while total video streams increased 350 percent during the same time period.

Unique Video Viewers and Total Video Streams at WhiteHouse.gov 

So who is viewing video at WhiteHouse.gov? Viewers of video content at the site over-indexed among males and people between the ages of 35 and 49 and those over 65 in March. Unique viewers 35 to 49 were 78 percent more likely to view video on whitehouse.gov than the average viewer, while people 65 and older were 48 percent more likely.

Unique Viewer Composition Index by Demographic Group for WhiteHouse.gov

Average Composition Index is 100

Another new video feature on whitehouse.gov, Open for Questions, was launched this March. It is a section of the Web site in which the President addresses questions posed by citizens via online video. Open for Questions was one of the top subdomains visited within WhiteHouse.gov, receiving 618,000 unique visitors during the month.

Those results come from a recent Nielsen study that surveyed 40,000 British Internet users and identified websites with the highest concentrations of users in particular age groups.

Nearly half of all unique visitors (40%) to the websites for Student Loans Company, UCAS, and Student Finance Direct were between the ages of 18 and 22, Nielsen reported.  Video-related content sites like Sidereel, TV-Links, and Alluc.org were also popular with that age category.

Frengo (26% of unique audience), RuneScape (25%), and Bebo (19%) drew the largest share of the users in the 12- to 17-year-old category, while Stardoll (32%) and Club Penguin (29%) were most popular among children under 12, according to Nielsen.