WebProNews

The total number of videos viewed online in the U.K. in April grew 47 percent over a year ago to 4.7 billion videos, according to a new report from comScore.

The report found that 21.8 million U.K. Internet users viewed a total of 971 million online display ads on multimedia sites during the month.

Google sites were the most popular U.K. online video property during the month with 2.4 billion videos viewed, an increase of 58 percent compared to a year ago, driven by the popularity of YouTube, which accounted for 99 percent of all videos viewed on the property.

BBC sites ranked second with 79 million videos viewed, followed by ITV sites (34.7 million videos), Megavideo (31.7 million videos), and Microsoft sites (30.2 million videos). Each of the top ten video properties had double digit growth during the past year, while several saw their number of videos viewed double or triple.

"With nearly five billion videos viewed in the U.K. in April, online video is a powerful and growing vehicle for online advertising placement," said Mike Read, SVP and managing director, comScore Europe.

"The online video market currently relies heavily on display ads for monetization, and in the coming months and years we can expect that video ads will play an even more prominent role. Despite the market's overwhelming size and audience at this phase of the growth curve, it is also clear that we're still in the early stages of advertising optimization and effectiveness in this increasingly important entertainment channel."

Among the 36.8 million U.K. Internet users in April, 35.4 million (96%) saw some form of display advertising. YouTube delivered display ads to the most people in the multimedia category, with 18.5 million visitors viewing a total of 621 million display ads. Metacafe ranked second with 1.6 million visitors who viewed ads, followed by Windows Media (1.2 million visitors viewed ads) and MySpace Video (1 million visitors viewed ads).