UK Web Video Consumption Nearly Doubles, YouTube Gobbles Up Our Eyeballs: Research

We Brits are now spending nearly twice as much time watching TV, video and movie websites as we did last year. Nielsen Online data out today shows such time increased 91 percent from 641 million minutes in September 2006 to 1.2 billion minutes in September 2007. Almost 21 million Britons (63 percent of those online) visited such a site in that month – up 28 percent from the prior year, when it was 55 percent of those online.

Nielsen saysYouTube gets the lion’s share of users and their attention by a country mile (9.4 million unique monthly users, 499 million minutes), ahead of the BBC (6.7 million users, 62 million minutes), Lycos Europe Movie (somehow three million users, 37 million minutes), BSkyB, ITV, Channel 4, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Video, Odeon, TV-Links and TV.com. Note that TV-Links, which provided merely links to off-site downloadable material but was shut in October after police investigation, is second only to YouTube for minutes of consumption.