comScore reports continued growth in online video market

Online video viewing figures continue to rise significantly month on month and comScore's latest report for December shows Hulu breaking a few of its own records.

by Helen Leggatt

Across the board, the online video market continued to grow with almost 178 million U.S. Internet users watching 33.2 billion videos in December, 2009, alone. In other words, 86.5% of total U.S. Internet users watched online videos. The average number of videos viewed per user was 187, or about 6 per day, with an average length of 4.1 minutes.

Hulu, the online repurposed television content aggregator co-owned by NBC Universal, News Corp. and The Walt Disney Co., had cause for celebration. They broke through the 1 billion mark for the number of videos streamed in December, 2009, found comScore. Another all-time high for the company was the number of videos watched per viewer - up to 22.9 from 21.1 in November.

Despite their successes, Hulu remains in second place as YouTube continues to lead the pack by a huge margin. Around 13 billion (40%) of the 33.2 billion videos were watched on the Google-owned site.

The top video ad networks in terms of their actual reach delivered were:-

- Tremor Media Video Network with 30.5% penetration
- BrightRoll Video Network with 21.7%,
- BBE with 21.2%.