Comscore released some interesting data from its Video Metric service which shows that 178 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in August for an average of 14.3 hours per viewer. According to Comscore, the total U.S. Internet audience engaged in more than 5.2 billion viewing sessions during the course of the month.
YouTube of course drives the majority of the video viewing, with 146.3 million unique viewers, but what may surprise you is that Facebook passed Yahoo and made its way into the second position. Yahoo! Sites still receive more "minutes per viewer" but it does signal a trend that more video is being consumed on social networks.
Other important findings from Comscore include:
- Top video ad networks (in terms of their potential reach of the total U.S. population) were Break Media at 46.4 percent, BrightRoll Video Network at 45.0 percent, and ScanScout Network at 44.5 percent.
- The duration of the average online content video was 4.8 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.
- Video ads accounted for 10.7 percent of all videos viewed and 1.0 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.