Google Gains Video Viewing Market Share

Google's investments in YouTube and its own video search software are paying page view dividends.

The search engine has gained more than 2 market share percentage points in online video watching, according to ComScore's latest compilation of monthly video watching. Google's online video market share grew to 31.3% from October to November.

And more than 75% of Web surfers watched streaming video or progressive video downloads during the month surveyed by ComScore's Video Matrix report. Web users love to watch for long periods of time, too. They averaged 3.25 hours of monthly video watching, according to ComScore.

After Google's strong market-share position, there was a big drop-off to Fox Interactive Media, which captured second place in the survey with a 4.4% share of market. Other finishers, in order, were: Yahoo sites with 3.5% market share; Viacom Digital, 2.6%; Time Warner Network, 1.9%; Microsoft sites, 1.9%; Disney Online, 1%; ABC.com, 0.9%; and ESPN, 0.9%.

The market research firm said nearly 9.5 billion online videos were viewed in November; Google accounted for 3 billion of those, with YouTube's 2.9 billion views accounting for nearly all of Google's online video viewing activity. Fox Interactive Media recorded 419 million viewed videos.

"In total," ComScore said, "138 million Americans -- approximately three in four U.S. Internet users -- viewed online video in November. Google sites also captured the largest online video audience with 76.2 million unique viewers."

Video viewing seems to be progressing, with leadership concentrated in YouTube and MySpace. ComScore said 74.5 million people watched 2.9 billion videos on YouTube, while 43.2 million watched 389 videos on MySpace. ComScore noted that the average online video's duration was 2.8 minutes and the average online video viewer consumed 69 videos.