YouTube hits major milestone -- 100M viewers

Computerworld - Did you start the year out watching videos on YouTube?

If you did, you're not alone.

In January, YouTube Inc. passed 100 million viewers in a month for the first time, according to online research firm comScore Inc.

ComScore also noted in an online report today that overall, Americans viewed 14.8 billion online videos in January, which is a 4% jump from December. And YouTube had the lion's share of that growth, accounting for 91% of the growth.

According to comScore, more than 147 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 101 videos each in January. And the average viewer watched about six hours of them in January.

Google Inc., which owns YouTube, was listed as the top U.S. video property, with 6.4 billion videos viewed, according to comScore. That accounts for 43% of the online video market share. And YouTube.com made up about 99% of all videos viewed on Google properties. Fox Interactive Media Inc. came in a distant second, with 552 million videos viewed, or 3.7%, followed by Yahoo Inc. sites, with 374 million or 2.5%.

In January, comScore reported that the number of worldwide Internet users passed the 1 billion mark for the first time in December. China had the largest online audience with 18% of the total number of global Internet users. The U.S. came in second, with 163 million users, or 16.2%, while Japan had the third-largest online audience, with 60 million users, or 6% of the worldwide total that month.

Also in January, Facebook Inc. reported a milestone of its own, hitting 150 million users for the first time.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted in a blog post that 150 million people are actively using the social networking site. And another statistic of note is that nearly half of them use the network on a daily basis.

"This includes people in every continent -- even Antarctica," wrote Zuckerberg. "If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria."

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