US Watches 5 Billion Online Videos Per Month

ComScore released its February 2011 US Online Video Rankings this week. Microsoft and Facebook continue to climb the charts, Hulu serves video ads at almost the same rate as it did before, and Americans watch billions of online videos.

Microsoft snuck into the #2 position this month on the Top Total Unique Viewers list with 48.8 million different sets of eyeballs, a 27% increase from its January number of 38.1 million. Vevo, the surprise #2 hit of last month, dropped down to #5 on the charts with a 10% decrease in unique viewers for a total of 45.9 million. Facebook now occupies the #4 spot with 46.7 total million unique viewers, up 11% from January. And Google sites, led by YouTube, maintained the #1 position despite a slight 2% decrease in overall uniques to end up a 141 million.

Hulu continues to dominate video ad views, delivering over 1.1 billion (with a “b”) of them in January. Everyone who watched videos on Hulu last month also spent an average of 224.3 minutes consuming content on the site, that includes approximately 48.1 video ads per person. That means your everyday consumer of Hulu watched a video ad every 4 minutes and 39 seconds, down 2 seconds from December.

Overall, Americans accumulated over 5 billion (again with a “b”) viewing sessions in February, up from 4.9 billion in January, and almost reaching the numbers from the holiday season viewing frenzy in December, which saw over 5.2 billion views.