• by Daisy Whitney , Op-Ed Contributor, November 9, 2012

The same amount of people are watching a lot more Web video than they were a year ago.

In September, Americans spent 40% more time with online video and watched 44% more videos than the same period the year before. Those are the findings from Nielsen’s latest monthly online video report. In September about 162 million Americans checked out Web video for an average of about seven hours. They watched nearly 26 billion videos. That compares to about the same amount of viewers  — 166.4 million — streaming 18 billion videos for about five hours on average in September 2011.

The most popular sites this September were YouTube, which lured 136 million uniques, or more than 80% of the entire audience. (What’s surprising is that there are some Web video viewers who aren’t watching YouTube each month. How is its audience not 100%?) YouTube is followed by Yahoo, Vevo, AOL and Facebook as top video sites, mirroring the same top five video destinations from Comscore’s numbers in September.

YouTube also delivered the most total streams in September at 16 billion, followed by Hulu with 695 million, Vevo with 636 million, AOL with 597 million and Netflix with 382 million.

But Netflix generates the most time and engagement with its content (which would be a powerful figure for Netflix if it were to sell ads). Netflix viewers spend an average of 11 hours each month on the site, followed by Hulu and YouTube viewers at about four hours each.