UK laps up online video

YouTube, the online video-sharing site, accounted for more than 50 per cent of the 3.5 billion video clips viewed in March 2008, according to figures released today.

Surfers in the UK spent a staggering 172 million hours watching videos online in the month of March, with the average amount of time spent watching a video around three minutes.

Google-owned YouTube is by far the favourite destination of UK surfers looking to watch videos online.

The BBC's websites, including the hugely popular iPlayer site, only managed a 1.2 per cent share, or 42.2 million video views.

According to web analyst ComScore, over 27 million UK surfers watched an average of 128 online video clips each in March.

The UK had the highest online viewing rate of the five countries ComScore measured, the others being Canada, the US, France and Germany.

The top five most popular sites for March were MySpace, owned by Fox Interactive Media, with just under 30 million videos viewed, followed by Microsoft's UK websites with 25 million views.

Yahoo completed the top five websites with 20 million videos viewed in March.

www.comscore.com
www.youtube.co.uk
www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer