comScore has just released its monthly U.S. online video rankings report for the first month of 2012, January. This month there was a small decline in online video consumption, mostly driven from a drop in views of the top three video destinations- YouTube, VEVO and Yahoo sites.
Here are the top U.S. online video destinations for January 2012:
Overall, 181.1 million Americans (84.4% of the U.S. internet audience) have watched videos online in the first month of 2012, small decline of 0.3% from December 2011. The average viewer has watched 22.6 hours of online videos, down from 23.2 hours the month before.
Although there weren’t any significant rankings movements across the top 10 online video destinations, there was an interesting traffic trending: The leading three online video destinations showed significant dropping while all seven others demonstrated at least some small increase in visitors.
Losers
Although Google sites (yes, its mostly YouTube) still leads safely, it had a drop of 3.3% in video viewers standing at a total of 152 million. VEVO also demonstrated a meaningful drop of 4% in viewers, falling to 51.5 million.
But with all due respect to YouTube and VEVO, Yahoo is definitely the biggest loser this month. The total amount of video views to Yahoo sites has dropped by 7.7% to 49.2 million.
Winners
Viacom Digital in the fourth place had a jump of 5.1% climbing to 48.1 million video viewers. Facebook, after two straight months under the losers column, is finally joining the winners with a jump of 7.4% to a total of 45.1 million video viewers.
The other online video destinations had a smaller increase in viewers: Microsoft sites by 0.9% (41.5 million viewers), AOL network by 1.5% (41 million viewers), Hulu by 0.5% (31.4 million views) and Amazon sites by 0.3% (27.9 million views).
NBC Universal managed to climb back to the 10th place with 27.1 million viewers on the expense of Turner Digital.
Engagement Rank
YouTube’s average viewer is watching videos the longest time, with approximately 7.5 monthly hours and Hulu is second with 3.15 monthly hours. All other online video destinations are very far behind, here’s the “engagement rank” (by average time per viewer):
- YouTube – 7.5 hours
- Hulu – 3.15 hours
- VEVO – 1.04 hours
- Viacom Digital – 58 minutes
- Yahoo Sites – 57.4 minutes
- AOL network – 51.4 minutes
- Microsoft Sites – 51.3 minutes
- Facebook – 22 minutes
- Amazon Sites – 19.7 minutes
- NBC Universal – 17.2 minutes