YouTube reaches 100M U.S. unique viewers in Oct.

For the first time in history, an online video site attracted 100 million unique users in the U.S. in a single month. Any guesses on which one?

YouTube continued to best its own records in October and served a record 5.3 billion online videos for a nearly 40 percent market share.

But Hulu, the NBC Universal/News Corp. joint venture, still continues to succeed at actually monetizing its video content as well as increasing video views and unique visitors. Hulu climbed to sixth in market share in October, as users watched 235 million videos, which is more than twice as many videos as it served in July 2008, according to comScore figures. The site continues to skyrocket in popularity, as users increasingly turn to its ad-supported, on-demand episodes of The Office, 30 Rock, and Saturday Night Live.

Plus, it is estimated that Hulu show ads with about 40 percent of its content, where as YouTube has been able to place ads only sparingly, because of advertiser reluctance to place brands around UGC.

As YouTube's viewership continues to increase, so does its bandwidth usage and fees for the usage. Although YouTube has made several efforts lately to increase the amount of professional content and to diversify its revenue streams, YouTube still faces a conundrum on how to make money while staying true to its values of letting users "broadcast themselves" for free. One highlight in the numbers for YouTube: Viewers watch an average of five times more videos on the site that any other site in the top 20 U.S. online video properties.  

For more:
- see the comScore report here 

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