Internet traffic measurement company comScore today released data from their December 2008 “comScore Video Metrix” service, indicating a huge jump in Internet video-viewing among US Internet users. A record 14.3 billion online videos were viewed during the month, representing an increase of 13 percent over November’s viewing stats.

YouTube led the Internet video portals, accounting for 49% of the incremental gain in December videos viewed versus the previous month.

In December, Google sites ranked as the top U.S. “video property,” with 5.9 billion videos viewed (41% online video market share), thanks to YouTube.com, which accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed at the property.

Fox Interactive Media ranked a distant second with 445 million videos (3.1%), followed closely by Yahoo! sites with 330 million (2.3%) and Viacom Digital with 291 million (2.0%).

Hulu continued its growth trajectory, climbing 6 percent over its November viewing numbers, to 241 million videos viewed.

Despite ranking fifth among video properties for number of videos viewed in December, it should be noted that Hulu scored the longest average duration for individuals’ online video viewing, just over 10 minutes.

Nearly 100 million YouTube video viewers (98.9 MM) watched 5.9 billion videos, for an average of 59 apiece. That’s a lot of tranquilized preschoolers, and dramatic rodents being viewed.

In terms of unique viewers of Internet video, nearly 150 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 96 videos apiece in December 2008. Google sites crossed the 100 million online video viewer mark during the month, representing two out of every three Internet users who watched video. Fox Interactive ranked second with 56.9 million viewers, followed by Yahoo! Sites (42.8 million) and AOL LLC (31.5 million).

Other notable findings from December 2008 include:

• 78.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.
• 98.9 million viewers watched 5.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (59.2 videos per viewer).
• 48.7 million viewers watched 367 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes.
• The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 10.1 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.

photo: Confusedvision