As the writers' strike continued to keep good television off the air, U.S. Web users ramped up their online video viewing in December to more than 10 billion videos, according to a survey from
comScore. Google's YouTube absolutely trounced the competition for video views, as more than half (79 million) of the 141 million viewers visited the Google video site, which accounted for more than
97 percent of videos viewed across the search engine's properties.
More numbers: Google's market share in terms of viewers was a whopping 43 percent, followed by MySpace parent Fox
Interactive Media with 23.9 percent and Yahoo, with 20.8 percent. In terms of total videos watched, Google had an even more astounding 32.6 percent of the market, compared to 3.5 percent for FIM and
3.4 percent for Yahoo. On YouTube, 77.6 million viewers in December watched an average of 41.6 videos each.
What do the numbers mean? Silicon Alley Insider's
Michael Learmonth says: "The high-volume streaming video game is already over. YouTube won." Why? Because FIM
and Yahoo have been losing share of the video pie each month. FIM lost almost a whole percentage point in terms of percentage of total videos viewed, falling from 4.4 percent in November to 3.5
percent in December. Yahoo, Viacom Digital, Microsoft and Time Warner also lost market share.
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