December Was Not a Good Month for Video on Facebook

Online metrics company comScore just released its monthly rankings of U.S. video properties. As usual, Google's YouTube remains far ahead of the competition with 157 million unique visitors who spent an average of 471.9 minutes on the site and watched 21 billion videos. The music-focused network VEVO came in second, but while Facebook was in third place in November with about 50 million uniques, it has now been overtaken by Yahoo's properties and fallen to fifth place with just about 42 million uniques. The length of the average number of minutes watch on the social network per user was up a bit, though, (23.9 minutes vs. 19.1)

While there is always some volatility in comScore's rankings, this slip by Facebook is pretty remarkable. The change may have been due to the holidays, where college students spent more time offline than usual. This is probably only part of the reason, though, as Facebook had 60 million uniques in October. It'll be interesting to see if this downward trend continues in January.

While Facebook had a bad month with regard to video then, Amazon did quite well. While Facebook may have suffered from the holidays, Amazon may have profited from the fact that more people were looking to watch long-form videos online. The site's viewership didn't even rank in comScore's top 10 in November, but came in as #9 with 28 million viewers and 95 million video views.