When it comes to online video, it’s hard to find someone who hasn’t watched at least one clip in the past month.
A whopping 83.5 percent of all U.S. Internet users watched a Web video in January, totaling over 171 million individuals, market researcher ComScore revealed yesterday in its online video rankings. The average online video lasted about five minutes, and those who watched ad-supported content were forced to sit through an average of 24 seconds worth of commercials.
As one might expect, Google easily led the way in total viewership last month, serving video to more than 144 million unique viewers through YouTube. Those people watched over 1.9 billion videos out of the nearly 4.9 billion watched in the U.S. across all video services last month, ComScore said. The average Google user spent just over 283 minutes watching video content in January.
Vevo, the online music video site started by Universal Media Group and Sony Music Entertainment, took the second spot in overall viewership last month with more than 51 million people watching video on the service. Those folks watched 121 million videos and spent about 92 minutes on average watching content on the site.
Yahoo’s video services came in just behind Vevo with nearly 49 million unique viewers and more than 193 million viewing sessions. The average Yahoo user spent 38 minutes watching video last month.
Hulu was the 10th-most-popular online video destination last month with nearly 25 million unique viewers. However, Hulu’s average viewing per user came in second behind Google with 236.4 minutes.
When it came to advertising, however, no other service bested Hulu. The site offered up over 1 billion ads during the month, and the average Hulu viewer watched 44.6 ads. ABC Television came in second in ComScore’s measure of ads per viewer with 22.3 commercials.
Across the entire online video market, over 4.3 billion ads were served, ComScore found. The research firm said the average online viewer watched 32 ads in January.
Online video advertising is on the rise. Back in July, ComScore said that 3.6 billion video ads were displayed that month. Hulu accounted for 783 million of those spots.
via CNET