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Americans watched 37 billion online videos last month

People in the U.S. gobbled up a whole lot of videos from YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, Hulu, and other sites in April, according to ComScore.

Lance Whitney Contributing Writer
Lance Whitney is a freelance technology writer and trainer and a former IT professional. He's written for Time, CNET, PCMag, and several other publications. He's the author of two tech books--one on Windows and another on LinkedIn.
Lance Whitney
Screenshot by Lance Whitney/CNET

How much online video did you watch last month?

Across the U.S., 181 million Internet users tracked by ComScore caught a total of 37 billion videos in April. That means 84.5 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed an online video, and the average person spent 21.8 hours doing so for the month.

Grabbing 157.7 million viewers, Google was the top site for video watching, thanks mostly to YouTube. Yahoo came in second place with 53.6 million viewers, followed by Vevo with 49.5 million, Facebook with 44.3 million, and Microsoft with 42.8 million.

Online video site Hulu was lower down the list, with 28.2 million viewers for the month. But it came in second behind Google for the total amount of time spent by the average viewer in April, at 3.8 hours, ComScore said.

Helping to pay for all that video content, video ads proved popular, intentionally or not.

A total of 9.5 billion video ads were viewed by a captive online audience last month. Hulu accounted for the highest number at 1.6 million, not surprising since Hulu and Hulu Plus users have to sit through ads as they watch their favorite videos.

Video ads also comprised 20.5 percent of all videos viewed online and 1.6 minutes of all time spent last month by Internet video watchers.