14 DAY TRIAL // Online video has had a great month in October in the US. Viewers are up across the board, but there aren't any surprises at the top, and Facebook is sitting at a more modest ninth spot rather than the third place other reports had put it at. YouTube once again played in a league of its own, with 12 times more videos streamed than its closest competitor Hulu, which has had a very good month.
Google streamed 10.5 billion videos in October in the US, making up 37.7 of the total number of videos watched this month. 99 percent of those were on YouTube, of course. Hulu followed with 855 million videos a 46 percent jump from the previous month. Microsoft rounds up the top three with 451 million videos watched across its online proprieties.
When it comes to actual viewers, things were mostly static. YouTube rules with 125.3 million unique visitors in October, basically the same as last month. Hulu saw some growth, from 38.7 million to 42.4 million viewers last month, but nothing like the jump it saw in videos watched, meaning that most users just watched a lot more videos.
The rising star, though, is Facebook which saw its audience jump from 31.1 million viewers in September to 41.1 million last month. Of course, with close to 100 million users in the US, the social networks has a lot of growth potential yet and could very well to do video what it did in the photo sharing market, where it quickly grew to dominate it now being the largest photo hosting service in the world. Interestingly though, 41.1 million people watched a video on MySpace, which bodes well for the social network turned entertainment hub. In total, 84.4 of the Internet audience in the US watched at least a video in October, while the average viewer watched 167 videos, 83 of which were on YouTube, adding up to 10.8 hours of video.
