Hulu's on the rise, but YouTube's still online video's big dog

Let’s talk numbers for a moment, shall we?

According to comScore Video Metrix, overall online video viewing fell 12 percent in February versus January, largely because February is three days shorter than January.

That seems like a “duh” fact to me, if in fact people still say duh.

However, here’s something a little more interesting: even with the overall drop in video viewing, NBC Universal’s Hulu.com saw a 42 percent gain in viewers, jumping two positions to become the fourth-highest ranked U.S. video property with 333 million videos viewed. Apparently those Super Bowl commercials featuring Alec Baldwin about your brain turning to mush really did the trick. With numbers like these, you can see why Jeff Zucker might be less interested in NBC’s primetime performance than he once was.

While Hulu can gloat about its jump to number four, Google can rest assured that YouTube remains by far the largest U.S. video player, with 5.3 billion videos viewed, notching 41 percent of the online video market share. While Google does offer Google Video, YouTube accounts for 99 percent of that, according to comScore.

Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace.com, came in second with 463 million videos and 3.5percent of market share. Yahoo! was in third with 353 million at 2.7 percent. The above-mentioned Hulu was in fourth and Microsoft, with sites such as msn.com, was in fifth at 2.0 percent. No wonder Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo! - it’s got to do something if it’s going to compete with Google at all.

Other top sites, although all with less than 2 percent of market share, are Viacom Digital, Turner, AOL, Disney Online and CBS Interactive.

From the point of view of unique viewers, Google remains number one by far, with nearly 100 million viewers in February watching almost 54 videos per viewer. Nearly 54 million unique viewers watched an average of 8.6 videos over at Fox Interactive Media. Nearly 42 million unique viewers watched an average of 8.5 viewers at Yahoo! Hulu had less uniques at almost 35 million, but they watched more videos at an average of 9.6 each.