comScore: AOL Ups December Video Viewers 48%

11 Jan, 2014 By: Erik Gruenwedel

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Google-owned YouTube again doubles nearest online video source for unique viewers

Dotcom pioneer AOL continues to improve its online video prowess, growing unique viewers 48% to 76.1 million in December compared to the same period in the previous year, according to new data from comScore. Close behind, Facebook saw unique video viewers grow 47% to 79.1 million.

Perennial leader Google-owned YouTube topped all online video platforms with more than 159 million unique viewers — up 4% from 2012. Yahoo upped unique video viewers 2.2% to 53.5 million.

comScore defines a video as any streamed segment of audiovisual content longer than three seconds, including both progressive downloads and live streams.

Facebook’s online video viewership spike is due to the recent inclusion of short (typically six-second) Vine videos that have been uploaded to Facebook. The other factor is the limited rollout in December of auto-play videos in the Facebook News Feed.

Nearly 52.4 billion video content views occurred during December, with YouTube generating the highest number at 13.4 billion, followed by Facebook with 3.7 billion and AOL with 1.4 billion. YouTube had the highest average engagement among the top 10 properties.

Meanwhile, Hulu exposed its viewers to nearly 32% more ads in December than during the same period last year. Notably, Hulu (and Hulu Plus), which is co-owned by The Walt Disney Co., 21st Century Fox and Comcast, reaches 32% less of the total U.S. population than it did in December 2012.

comScore classifies video ads to include streaming-video advertising only and does not include other types of video monetization, such as overlays, branded players, matching banner ads, etc.

Time spent watching video ads totaled 13.2 billion minutes, with AOL delivering the highest duration of video ads at nearly 1.9 billion minutes. Video ads reached nearly 56% of the total U.S. population an average of 204 times during the month.
 

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