Microsoft's Bing gains in online video rankings

ASPIRING SEARCH OUTFIT Microsoft's Bing search engine has managed to increase the number of video watchers it recieves each month and has leaped from seventh to second place in Comscore's rankings.

Obviously there are a lot of monthly, nightly, even hourly video viewings on the Internet and some of them are even legitimate and viewed at family-friendly websites.

Comscore said that 170 million US Internet users watched online video content in February for an average of 13.6 hours per viewer. Which is a lot of video and suggests that most television sets are getting more attention from dust than from viewers.

Although Bing was a big gainer, Google's websites, which include Youtube, were the most popular and took first place with 141.1 million unique viewers. Microsoft's websites, which include Bing, had 48.8 million viewers, Yahoo was in third with 46.7 million and Facebook fourth with just under that number.

Overall there were 5 billion video viewing sessions, of which the leader Google took 1.8 billion, or - if you are an employer or a student of time and motion - 262 minutes or 4.4 hours per person.

More traditional video players, such as NBC and Turner's digital TV arm both took around twenty minutes per person through February.

This is a month of victories for the Vole's search engine, which earlier in the year was accused of using Google's search results and in early March overtook the veteran search engine Yahoo. µ