Report: Online Video Usage Hits 23 Hours in December

Average viewer spent about 3 hours on Hulu according to comScore

By George Winslow -- Broadcasting & Cable, 1/18/2012 11:18:22 AM

Online video usage once again rose in December according to the comScore Video Metrix service, which found that 182 million U.S. Internet users watched 43.5 billion videos. That means the average user spent about 23.2 hours watching online video.

Google sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube, far outpaced other sites as the top online video content property in December with 157.2 million unique viewers, while VEVO ranked second with 53.7 million and third ranked Yahoo! sites had 53.3 million viewers. Viacom Digital with 45.8 million and Facebook with 42 million rounded out the top five.

Google sites had the most engagement, with 7.9 hours per viewer followed by Hulu with around 3 hours.

Americans viewed 7.1 billion video ads in December, with Hulu generating the highest number of video ad impressions at nearly 1.5 billion, followed by Adap.tv in second with 1.1 billion.

Time spent watching video ads totaled more than 3 billion minutes during the month, with Adap.tv delivering the highest duration of video ads at 636 million minutes.

Video ads reached 51 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 46 times during the month. Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 46.

Overall, about 85 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video but most of it continued to be short form, with the average video lasting 5.8 minute.

Video ads accounted for 14.1 percent of all videos viewed and 1.2 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.