YouTube views in US more than double the world’s population

Over 26 billion videos were streamed in the United States by 163 million unique viewers on YouTube, with an average of just over 160 streams per viewer of videos on the site.

Around six hours were spent watching videos online last month, and four-fifths of the total number of viewers watched videos on YouTube.

An investigation conducted by Nielsen into the online video market in the US revealed that there were a total of 163,478,000 views of 26,167,111,000 video streams on YouTube, leading to an average of 160.1 videos per viewer.

During May, YouTube achieved 136 million unique viewers, which was more than three times the total of Yahoo! (45.336 million); VEVO (42 million); AOL (25.6 million) and MSN (24 million). The highest-ranked subscription video service was Hulu, which launched back in 2007, and amassed 15.48 million users.

YouTube also led in terms of total streams with 16.5 billion, or 121 streams per viewer. Hulu achieved almost half this number of average streams over the month (62), from users who all paid for the service, but just 968 million total streams.

VEVO had 727 million streams (17 per viewer) and Yahoo! 434 million (9.6 per viewer). Netflix, which rivals Hulu for video streaming subscribers, weighed in with 300 million total streams. Dailymotion and the ESPN Digital Network achieved 229.4 million and 219 million streams respectively.