(7 February 2009 9:00 pm)

MUMBAI: ComScore, which measures the digital world, has released December 2008 data from the ComScore Video Metrix service showing that US Internet users viewed a record 14.3 billion online videos during the month.

This represents an increase of 13 per cent surge over the previous month. YouTube led the growth charge, accounting for 49 per cent of the incremental gain in videos viewed versus November.

In December, Google sites once again ranked as the top US video property with 5.9 billion videos viewed (41 per cent online video market share), with YouTube.com accounting for more than 99 per cent of all videos viewed at the property. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 445 million videos (3.1 per cent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 330 million (2.3 per cent) and Viacom Digital with 291 million (2 per cent). Hulu continued its growth trajectory, climbing six per cent to 241 million videos viewed.

Nearly 150 million US Internet users watched an average of 96 videos per viewer in December. Google Sites surpassed 100 million online video viewers during the month, representing two out of every three Internet users who watched video. Fox Interactive ranked second with 56.9 million viewers, followed by Yahoo! Sites (42.8 million) and AOL (31.5 million).

Other notable findings from December 2008 include:

• 78.5 per cent of the total US Internet audience viewed online video.

• The average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.

• 98.9 million viewers watched 5.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (59.2 videos per viewer).

• 48.7 million viewers watched 367 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer).

• The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes.

• The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 10.1 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.