comScore reports that 14.8 billion online videos were viewed during the month of January 2009, a 4% increase over the previous month, December 2008. More than 147 million U.S. Internet users watched, on average, 101 videos per user during the month of January.

The top video viewing site was YouTube.com followed in the far distance by Fox Internactive, then Yahoo!. Other findings: the average duration for watching online videos was 3.5 minutes, up from 3.2 minutes in December.

Megavideo.com is tenth on the list of most visited video sites with 102,857,000 videos viewed on it in January ’09. Its viewers spent an average of 24.9 minutes per video, a longer duration than any of the other video websites.

Because of increased accessibility and following, video, motion and sound are viable communication tools across the web, potentially increasing message impact over other forms of content. Internet video has come of age; it is present now, rapidly becoming vital to eMarketing and outreach strategies.

comScore: YouTube Surpassed 100 Million U.S. Viers for the First Time