A new report from comScore confirms YouTube still dominates the online viewing market, with more than 10 billion videos viewed during the month of August.
The overall number accounted for 40 percent of all online video viewership last month, with Microsoft, Viacom, and Hulu rounding out the rest of the top select sites. Compared to Google-owned YouTube, Microsoft controlled just 2.2% of the market with 547 million viewers, while Viacom coming in third with just 2.1% market share, with 539 million videos viewed.
comScore's research will only put additional pressure on Google to monetize advertising throughout the extremely popular video site. Despite being a popular web site with a large viewership, YouTube has been unable to cash in with advertisements, as not very many users actually click on the ads.
In August, more than 25 billion videos were watched, with YouTube and other Google sites drawing in 121.4 million unique viewers throughout the month. The average Google viewer looked at 82.8 videos, while Microsoft averaged 10 videos and Yahoo video viewers looked at 6.9 videos per month.
I'm interested to see how Google gets advertisers to finally begin writing big checks, as sites such as Hulu seem to currently get more attention.
YouTube is offering people who make unique videos that receive lots of views and linkbacks a slice of revenue, which some say will help. Although I believe it's true that viral videos are helpful, the site still needs to find new methods to bring in serious ad revenue.
