Yawn, Yet Another Record Month for Online Video in the US

Another month, another record for online video. The Americans, along with the rest of the world, just can't seem to get enough of small-screened and many times poor-quality videos. November saw another increase in viewers and streams and passed the 30 billion views mark for the first time in history, albeit the rather short one of online video. No use wondering what the top looks like, YouTube dominated yet again with a solid lead in the number of streams, visitors and videos per user.

"Google Sites continued to rank as the top U.S. video property in November as it delivered 12.2 billion videos viewed with YouTube.com accounting for nearly 99 percent of all videos viewed at the property. Hulu ranked second with 924 million videos viewed (3.0 percent) followed by Viacom Digital with 500 million (1.6 percent) and Microsoft Sites with 480 million (1.5 percent)," comScore announced.

On the face of it, just under 40 percent of the market doesn't really sound like that much, Google has 80 percent and even more of the search market in some countries. But considering that the runner up, Hulu, managed to get just 3 percent, 12 billion videos versus a little over 900 million, it’s pretty clear that everyone else is taking a pounding from the Google behemoth. What it does show, however, is that, despite YouTube's obvious lead, the rest of the market is pretty healthy and well spread and surprisingly big.

"More than 170 million viewers watched an average of 182 videos per viewer during the month of November. Google Sites attracted 129 million unique viewers during the month (94.7 videos per viewer), followed by Yahoo! Sites with more than 55 million viewers (8.5 videos per viewer) and Fox Interactive Media with 50 million viewers (8.9 videos per viewer)," the analytics firm also revealed.

These numbers are much more compelling, more than half of the Americans watched at least one video online in November, representing a big chunk of the people with Internet connections. Of the videos watched, half were on YouTube, but Hulu is coming up strong with 21.1 videos viewed per user, the second biggest number. Probably the most interesting players to watch in the file though is Facebook, which, despite not getting in the top ten when it comes to videos watched and making it at just number seven when it comes to visitors, is probably going to grow at a very good rate in the coming months.