Online Video: 15 Billion Views And Not A Dime Of Profit? (GOOG)(MSFT)(NWS)(VIA)(YHOO)

New data released by comScore shows that US internet users watched more than 15 billion videos last month.  Almost 40% of those were watched on Google (GOOG) sites, most of them on YouTube. The search company as much as admits that it has not come up with a way to make money on this business. It is not clear that is different for any of the other large online firms which offer large libraries to consumers.

The rest of the list of sites which have a large number of video views are mostly the large portal and content company sites. News Corp’s (NWS) Fox Interactive is in second place, followed by Yahoo! (YHOO), Viacom (VIA) and Microsoft (MSFT).

Hulu, which was founded in March 2007 by NBC Universal and News Corp, is the only site on the top ten list that has a large quantity of high-quality feature length content. People who visit Hulu spend an average of almost 12 minutes on each video that they watch. The average length of time spent watching a single video on the top ten sites is three minutes. Given that amount of junk at YouTube, which dominates the rankings, that figure seems high.

Douglas A. McIntyre