Online Viewership Hits Record Levels

RESTON: Google sites—led by YouTube—hit the 10 billion videos viewed mark in August, representing 40 percent of the more than 25 billion videos viewed during the month.

According to new data from comScore, Microsoft sites ranked second with 547 million videos viewed, just a 2.2 percent share, followed by Viacom Digital with 539 million videos (2.1 percent) and Hulu with 488 million videos viewed (1.9 percent). Rounding out the list of top U.S. Internet properties are Fox Interactive Media (1.5 percent), Yahoo! sites (1.4 percent) and Turner (1.2 percent). CBS Interactive, Disney Online and AOL each had less than a 1-percent share.

The research also indicates that more than 161 million viewers watched an average of 157 videos per viewer during the month of August. Google sites attracted 121.4 million unique viewers during the month, watching 82.8 videos per viewer, followed by Microsoft sites with 54.9 million viewers (10 videos per viewer) and Yahoo! sites with 51.6 million viewers (6.9 videos per viewer). The numbers also show that 81.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience watched online video last month, with the average viewer watching 9.7 hours online.

YouTube attracted 120.5 million viewers that watched an average of 82.6 videos each, while MySpace drew 44.9 million viewers who watched 340 million videos, or 7.6 each. The average Hulu user, meanwhile, watched 12.7 videos, for a total of 1 hour and 17 minutes of video per viewer.