Movieclips, a major YouTube Channel, witnessed higher usage and growing ad revenues during pandemic-disrupted 2020 versus 2019 -- partly due to greater at-home media consumption and U.S. movie theater closures.

Total viewing hours grew 42% to 412 million. Movieclips has a library of 35,000 pieces of content, which earn 1.5 billion views a month.

In addition, advertising revenue doubled in 2020 versus the year before, growing advertising clients by more than three times.

Movieclips is a part of Fandango Movieclips, which is a network of 12 movie-related channels.

Owned by NBCUniversal, Fandango is also is home to a number of variety movie-related businesses, including movie-ticketing site (Fandango), movie-review site (Rotten Tomatoes) and VOD services (Fandango Now, Vudu), as well as content discovery.

Fandango will be a key piece of NBCU’s growing media-buying/planning service, One Platform, says Sandro Corsaro, senior vice president-Chief Creative Officer of Fandango, speaking with Television News Daily.

“We are closing in on 80 million global subscribers and getting into markets that historically NBCUniversal has not been in,” says Corsaro. One Platform intends to provide streamlined access to marketers for all its media platforms.

Corsaro says user session time on the site is growing. “We have seen days and weeks where people are [seeing] five to six video views at a time. You are talking 20 to 30 minutes.” Previously, it was around two to three video views per session, totaling around nine minutes.

Movieclips runs movie trailers, film compilations, mash-ups and curated movie segments, such as car chases and actor specific video views. It recently started expanding into TV clip content.

Describing its overall audience, Corsaro says: “We got real young [in terms of viewers], more diverse and international in a blink of an eye over five years.”

In part, he says, this resulted “in a massive amount of engagement,” which rose 23% year-over-year to 127 million data points in 2020 versus the year before.