San Francisco — Even though the acquisition of YouTube so far has not given any financially solace to the search engine Google, but according to the latest online video metrics by comScore Inc, the popular video-sharing site has clearly made Google a giant in the world of online video, more than 13 billion videos were watched online in the United States in April, comScore reported on Tuesday.
According to the latest figures quoted comScore Inc., which tracks online activities of e-commerce, advertising and video, released its April data of video viewed by 178 million Internet users in the United States, or 83.5 percent of the total American Internet gathering, watched some form of video online during April.
According to the company’s press release, a total of 30.3 billion videos were watched by US based internet users in the month of April 2010. And as expected, the largest contributor to online video viewing was search-engine giant’s popular video site YouTube was nearly the sole source of the traffic with 13 billion video views, making up 43.2% of the total views. This was followed by Hulu 3.2%, Microsoft Sites 2.1% and Viacom at 1.3%.
The number of US populace tuning into videos on the Internet in April was just shy of 178 million, with six-month-old Vevo, YouTube overshadowed other competitors, dominating the attention of 135 million Web surfers, that equates with a 41.8% share in March. Ever since acquiring YouTube several years ago for $1.65 billion, Google has been searching for ways to make it a profitable business and add more licensed content.
Hulu, which offers videos from mainstream media outlets, including ABC, Fox and NBC, was a distant second streaming 958 million views during the same period by a total of 38.7 million people, with the average number of views working out to be nearly 25.
Interestingly Vevo, a video service that was recently introduced in late 2009 and focuses on music videos, captured around 43.6 million videos viewed about 1.1 percent of the online video market, according to comScore.
Vevo, whose financiers include Abu Dhabi Media Company, prepares to put up videos available at a Vevo channel at YouTube and at Vevo.com website. Vevo plans to be an online platform for a powerhouse concert to kick off the World Cup soccer tournament taking place in South Africa this month.
Other online video sites included Microsoft Corp. sites, which delivers video through its Zune network, displayed 644 million online video views, or a 2.1% share, flat with March, and Viacom, which owns the MTV network, showed 384 million video views.
On an average, Google sites, were still #1 at 136 million unique users, where each viewer watched a total of 171 videos and again claiming the #1 spot at 96 videos per viewer and Hulu following at #2 with 24 videos per viewer. The average duration of these videos was a relatively short 4.4 minutes long, which comes to an astounding 253,652 years of video.
The detailed report can be viewed here.