• by Daisy Whitney , Op-Ed Contributor, March 16, 2012

As the political season heats up with primaries, Web consumers watched nearly 815 million online news and information videos last month. That’s from a total of about 38 million overall videos viewed online.

What’s more, the recently launched partnership between Yahoo and ABC snared an impressive half of those news views. According to comScore data for February, more than 72 million unique viewers watched those 815 million news and information videos in February, with Yahoo and ABC capturing 50% of those views. Specifically, about 43 million unique visitors watched about 411 million videos from Yahoo and ABC News, comScore said in data it shared with its partners. MSNBC snagged 19%, or 19 million viewers watching 156 million videos. Next was CNN at 13% with 14 million unique visitors tuning into nearly 108 million videos.

ABC and Yahoo announced a partnership in October to both share news stories and jointly produce video series. That partnership seems to be paying off, evidenced by these early traffic numbers, and suggests that location, location, location may be what matters in online news real estate. Yahoo is one of the most visited Web sites in the world and claims about 173 million unique visitors per month. The share that ABC-Yahoo snagged in the online news race underscores the value of sheer mass and volume in winning in online news.

Despite its massive traffic, Yahoo has lagged in ad dollars. Marquee video and content may give it a boost, especially since news videos are popular content for video ad buying.

Key to the success will be whether ABC News and Yahoo can hold onto this kind of massive distribution of views in the coming months.