Report: U.S. Online Video Viewing Dips 2.5% in January

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on March 9, 2010 - 9:33am.

Reston, Va. - Online video viewing in the U.S. was down 2.5% in January, to 32.4 billion views, according to a report from Internet audience measurement firm comScore. The number of unique viewers also fell to 173.4 million, from 177.9 million in December.

Google-owned (NASD: GOOG) sites, including YouTube, accounted for 12.8 billion views and 39.5% of the market.

The figures show that YouTube's traffic in January averaged out to 93.9 videos per viewer.

The Hulu video portal came in second, with 903 million views, although this figure was down 11% from the more than 1 billion views Hulu counted in December.

The rest of the pack included sites owned by Microsoft (NASD: MSFT) (491 million video views); Yahoo (NASD: YHOO) (435 million); Viacom (NYSE: VIA) (361 million); and Fox (NYSE: NWS) (293 million).

Vevo, the music video portal joint venture that launched on Dec. 9, counted 226 million views and 32.4 million unique viewers in January, taking ninth place in comScore's rankings.