Web Video Viewing Ballooned in December

New statistics show traffic to sites like YouTube increasing by 13 percent in December.

Winter weather, holiday anxiety and a failing economy seems to be the perfect cocktail for traffic on Internet video sites, which saw a huge spike in viewing this December. New figures from comScore show that online video properties like YouTube and Hulu saw a 13 percent jump in viewing in that month alone.

Predictably, YouTube continued to dominate by accounting for 41.2 percent of all videos watched, but it also accounted for the biggest part of the month’s leap in traffic: nearly 50 percent. Fox, Yahoo! and Viacom trail with 3.1, 2.3 and 2.0 percent of traffic total traffic for the month, respectively.

Hulu, though still a relatively middle-of-the-road player, showed promising growth by getting six percent more views for a total of 240,585.

Spread those 14,318,722 Internet clips videos (an average of 3.2 minutes long apiece) across 150 million U.S. Internet users, and you get some pretty interesting statistics. Given that 78.5 percent of Internet users watched videos, that’s 96 videos per user, or roughly five hours of watching video on the Internet.