Online analytics tracker comScore announced the results of its May online video rankings, which shows that YouTube remains the undisputed king of the online video realm. The Google-owned online video giant led all of Google’s video sites to help bring in a whopping 147.2 million unique visitors during the month of May. According to comScore’s count, the total US Internet audience is 176.3 million. So, in other words, nearly every American on the Internet watches YouTube — perhaps not particularly shocking when you think about it, but massively impressive nonetheless.
The 147.2 million visitors racked up a total of nearly 2.2 billion separate viewing sessions. And each visitor watched an average of 311.2 minutes (5.2 hours) of video over the course of May.
After YouTube’s massive lead, music video site VEVO came in second, with 60.3 million unique visitors, followed by all Yahoo! websites (55.5 million) and Facebook (48.2 million). Visitors to Viacom web properties (which includes all of MTV, VH1, Paramount, etc) amounted to 46.53 million, the fifth largest amount of traffic. This was almost tied by Microsoft video sites, which had 46.50 million.
Hulu came in last (10th place), with 28 million visitors — but that doesn’t mean it’s lost a thing. In fact, comScore reports that Hulu generated more ad impressions than any other online video service. Of the 4.6 billion video ads Americans suffered through in May, 1.3 billion of them were played on Hulu. In total, Americans watched 2 billion minutes worth of video ads, with 560 million of those coming through Hulu. The NBC-owned video streaming site also had the highest frequency of video ads: an average of 48 over the month for every visitor to the site. The study found that 45 percent of the total US population sees video ads about 34 times each month.
ComScore also discovered that 83.3 percent of the US Internet audience watches videos online. On average, online videos are 5.2 minutes long, with video ads running for about 24 seconds.
