comScore: U.S. Video Views Up 45%, Even As Duration Increases

U.S. Internet users watched 13.5 billion online videos in October, which was a 45 percent year-over-year increase, according to comScore, which finally got around to publicly releasing video measurements for the first time in a while.

What’s more, the average duration of videos watched was up as well, to 3 minutes per video. For reference, last September, 9 billion videos were viewed with an average duration of 2.7 minutes.

Part of what’s bringing up the numbers is Hulu, which in its short lifespan has already risen to No. 6 by comScore’s count. (comScore already said that Hulu had some of the largest gains in October for any type of web site, let alone video.) Hulu had 235 million videos viewed in October, with an average duration of 11.6 minutes.

Meanwhile, Google continued its dominance, and for the first time its various video platforms (including YouTube) had in excess of 100 million U.S. video viewers. Nearly all those viewers watched videos on YouTube, which on its own barely missed the cutoff with 99.5 million viewers.

What remains to be seen is if these numbers can be kept up next year when there’s no hotly contested presidential election.