YouTube Surpasses 100 Million U.S. Viewers in January

YouTube, the largest video site in the world, has surpassed 100 million U.S. viewers for the first time. According to ComScore, the U.S. Internet users viewed 14.8 billion online videos during the month, representing an increase of 4% versus December 2008. YouTube which led the growth charge, accounting for 91 percent of the incremental gain in the number of videos viewed versus December, as it surpassed the 100 million viewers mark for the first time.

In January, Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property with 6.4 billion videos viewed (43 percent online video market share), with YouTube.com accounting for more than 99% of all videos viewed at the property. More than 147 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 101 videos per viewer in January. Google Sites grew to 102 million online video viewers during the month, or more than two out of every three Internet users who watched video - now that's a lot of loss productivity!

Other notable findings from January 2009 include:

* 76.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
* The average online video viewer watched 356 minutes of video (approximately 6 hours), up 15 percent versus December.
* 100.9 million viewers watched 6.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (62.6 videos per viewer).
* 54.1 million viewers watched 473 million videos on MySpace.com (8.7 videos per viewer).
* The duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes, up from 3.2 minutes per video in December.
* The duration of the average online video viewed at Megavideo was 24.9 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips with others. Three former PayPal employees actually created the site back in February of 2005. In November 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google Inc.

Full details of the January video sites report can be found at ComScore.com