MUMBAI: The comScore online video rankings have shown that while the number of content pieces watched online has dipped but online video advertising is getting popular.

The monthly ranking of the online video market showed that 188.5 million Americans watched 46.7 billion online content videos which attracted 22.8 billion video ad views. This compared with 187 million viewers consuming more than 48 billion online content videos with 19.6 billion video ad views.

As ever YouTube-driven Google sites dominated, boasting the highest average engagement among the top ten properties, taking 167 million unique viewers. The month’s big news in terms of properties though was AOL which captured the number two spot with 71.2 million views, up 57.9 million in July, displacing Facebook to third place with 62.2 million even though the social network added just under a million more viewers. Next was NDN with 50.7 million and VEVO with 49.4 million. August 2013 also saw 46.7 billion video content views with Google sites generating the highest number at 17.4 billion, followed by AOL with 992 million and Facebook with 803 million.

All of this content activity was the driver for an increasingly robust online video where 87 per cent of the US internet audience viewed online video for which the duration of the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes with the average online content video rolling in at 5.2 minutes. Video ads accounted for a third of all videos viewed and 3.4 per cent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

Google sites contributed 3.2 billion video ad impressions out of the total of 22.8 billion for the month. Adap.tv came in second with more than 2.4 billion ads, followed by BrightRoll Platform with 2.4 billion and LiveRail.com with 2.2 billion. Time spent watching video ads was 8.5 billion minutes, with BrightRoll Platform and Adap.tv delivering the highest duration of video ads at 1.1 billion minutes each. Video ads reached 56 per cent of the total US population an average of 132 times during the month. The recently enriched Hulu over-the-top (OTT) service delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 71.