But those new shows were announced in early March and haven't yet aired, so they can’t account for the 20% increase in online video viewership Yahoo gained from January 2012 to February 2012. Either Bill Maher attracted a lot of viewers or Yahoo is doing a better job of pushing its 177+ million unique monthly U.S. visitors toward watching more of its moving pictures online.
In the latest installment of Internet marketing research company comScore’s U.S. Online Video Rankings, Yahoo climbed to the number two position on the Top U.S. Online Video Content Properties Ranked by Unique Video Viewers chart. Its 60+ million uniques in February were good for an increase of more than 10 million individuals over the January numbers. Those 60+ million uniques also gave Yahoo roughly 8 million more uniques than third place Vevo, which usually commands the ranking of runner-up next to Google/YouTube thanks to its multi-lingual and perennially appealing music video content.
The other major surprise on the comScore charts was the appearance of Google/YouTube in the category of Top U.S. Online Video Ad Properties Ranked by Video Ads Viewed after a long absence. ComScore notes the reappearance is due to the “recent inclusion of certain YouTube ad formats” in the company’s reporting tactics. The research giant’s new accounting methods put Google/YouTube at delivering more than 1.1 billion online video ads for the month, but that’s still a few hundred million behind Hulu’s dominating 1.55 billion figure.