In what is becoming a monthly given, Google Sites again attracted the top number of unique online viewers (151.656 million) in May, according to the comScore video matrix rankings.
Fueled primarily by video viewing at YouTube, the search engine's numbers more than doubled those of its nearest competitor, Yahoo Sites and comprised a majority of the total 180.503 million viewing audience.
All those viewers were also watching video ads. Records there were broken as American video ad viewers broke the 10 billion mark for the first time ever.
Rounding out the top five rankings for overall online content properties were VEVO (48.258 million unique viewers), Microsoft Sites (44.356 million unique viewers), Facebook.com and AOL. Amazon.com Sites, surprisingly perhaps, came in ninth place with 27.158 million viewers.
Google sites also dominated other top 10 categories, with 35.556 billion videos watched by viewers who spent 1,315.3 minutes doing it. Yahoo! sites, again, were less than half of that with 17.618 billion videos and an average of 462.7 minutes.
Both AOL (569 million videos, 60.5 minutes) and News Distribution Network (268.801 million, 86.8 minutes) outperformed their total viewer rankings and Hulu came in third in minutes watched with 253.7 minutes of viewing time spread among only a tenth place number of 25.689 million unique viewers.
Digging deeper into the stats, comScore determined that Americans looked at 10 billion video ads during the month (an "all-time high") led by Hulu which showed more than 1.6 billion video ads to edge out Google Sites (1.4 billion). BrightRoll Video Network (1.1 billion) also broke the billion mark while Adap.tv came up just short with 966 million. The statistics showed that video ads reached 52 percent of the total U.S. population which looked at them 64 times during the month. Hulu again led that space with 56 while ESPN delivered 29 ads per viewer.
The site broke down a number of other statistics including the fact that VEVO@Youtube (47.6 million viewers) and Warner Music@YouTube (27.7 million viewers) continued to be the top video music channels on YouTube.
Also noted: 84.5 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online content with an average viewing time of 6.5 minutes. The average video ad had people's attention for 0.4 minutes but accounted for 21.6 percent of all videos viewed and 1.9 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.
For more:
- see the comScore release
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