ComScore: Netflix Now A Top 20 Online Video Site

There was some hoopla yesterday about the news that Hulu had broken the 1 billion videos viewed in a month threshold in December. And rightfully so, it’s the first video service to do that other than YouTube. But there’s another hot property that is rising fast in the streaming video realm as well: Netflix.

The movie rental giant crossed into the top 20 video sites on the web for the first time in December, according to numbers from ComScore. Specifically, they now sit at number 19, just ahead of Break Media, and just behind Justin.TV. And with over 127 million views last month, and rising fast, it shouldn’t be long before they’re in the top 15 with the likes of Facebook and ESPN.

As a streaming service, Netflix has seen huge growth over the past year as it continues to cut deals to get its content on different living room set top boxes. The service clearly believes that streaming is its future, even as it alienates some of its current bread-and-butter DVD rental customers by doing things like agreeing not to rent new DVD releases until they’ve been out for 28 days (something which hurts the availability of the most popular movies on the service). And that’s the right stance, but they’re going to have a hard time convincing the studios to ever give them newer release films to stream since those guys still believe they can sell DVDs no one really wants to own.

This week, Netflix also announced the addition of a bunch of new indie films to its streaming catalog. And during their quarterly earnings report last week, they revealed that nearly half of their subscribers are now streaming some content.

Here are the top 20 video properties by number of videos streamed per months (in thousands)

comScore Video Metrix (U.S.) Videos (000)
Total Internet : Total Audience 33,242,835
1. Google Sites 13,242,487
2. Hulu 1,013,494
3. Microsoft Sites 561,052
4. Fox Interactive Media 550,505
5. Yahoo! Sites 539,416
6. Viacom Digital 372,641
7. Turner Network 366,987
8. CBS Interactive 297,298
9. MEGAVIDEO.COM 210,294
10. AOL LLC 209,957
11. Vevo 174,911
12. Disney Online 171,946
13. ESPN 165,743
14. FACEBOOK.COM 164,581
15. Blinkx 164,287
16. NBC Universal 160,205
17. DAILYMOTION.COM 133,436
18. JUSTIN.TV 128,102
19. NETFLIX.COM 127,016
20. Break Media 120,104