James R | On 03, Feb 2014

US viewers watched more than 50 billion videos online in December 2013, according to comScore.

The figures show that online video is becoming increasingly popular in the USA, with 188.2 million viewers watching 52.4 billion videos in the final month of last year – the first time that has exceeded 50 billion.

The figures should be taken with a slight pinch of salt, because comScore’s report counts each section of long-form, segmented content (e.g. television episodes with ad pods in the middle) as a distinct stream. (Video views also count both user-initiated and auto-played videos watched for longer than 3 seconds, although do not include adverts.) Nonetheless, the measure of online video consumption shows a growing trend among audiences in America, with 86.9 per cent of the US Internet audience watching online video.

Google Sites (read: YouTube) dominated activity, attracting 159.1 million unique viewers, who streamed a total of 13.4 billion videos across the month. Facebook was in second with 79.1 million viewers watching 3.7 billion videos and AOL (76.2 million and 1.4 billion). Facebook’s December numbers were significantly higher than previous months thanks to the inclusion of Vine videos shared on the social media network, although auto-play videos in Facebook News Feeds also played a small role.

Google Sites also boasted the highest average engagement, with viewers spending 356.7 minutes in December watching their videos – seven times the number of minutes spent watching videos on Facebook.

VEVO was the most popular YouTube Partner Channel, in terms of unique video viewers, with Warner Music and warnerbros vfp also appearing in the top 10.

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