According to the latest data from comScore, U.S. Internet users watched 39 billion online content videos in September. That’s up a bit from the 37.7 billion video views the company reported in August, though the total number of unique viewers dipped to around 181.5 million from 188 million in the previous month. In total, comScore reports, 85 percent of U.S. Internet users viewed online video last month (down from 87.3 percent in August) and the average length of these videos was about 6.4 minutes (down from 6.7 minutes in the previous month).
As usual, Google played host to the most popular video sites, including YouTube. Last month, Google’s video sites had just over 150 million unique visitors who watched a total of over 13.1 billion videos. The average user watched 419 minutes of video on the site. Obviously, none of the other video services can compete with this. Yahoo came in second last month, just like in August, with 57.4 million unique viewers. While Microsoft came in at No. 3 last month, though, the company’s video properties took a bit of a tumble in September and fell to No. 9. Instead, our parent company AOL came in at No. 3 with a total of 53.8 million viewers. Other online video outfits that gained users last month were VEVO, Grab Media, NDN and Amazon, though the number of total videos played on these sites was down, as well.
Facebook, which only recently became a major force in the online video market, saw a dip in total user numbers and total videos played on the site, as well as a rather substantial decrease in average engagement from 16.1 minutes per user in August to 13.6 in September.
The fact that this month’s numbers are down a bit is probably due to the usual seasonal variations (kids are back in school after the summer, etc.). Interestingly, comScore’s numbers from September 2011 look very similar to this year’s.
As for online video ads: U.S. Internet users watched a whopping 9.4 billion video ads last month, the majority of which were served by Google (1.76 billion), BrightRoll (1.35 billion) and Hulu (1.17 billion).
