During May 2012 alone, there were over 163 million unique video viewers who streamed well over 26 billion videos online. Those numbers are staggering.

The average user spent almost six hours that month just watching streaming video.

Nielsen, the rating people, were keeping track of all the streaming video back in May and they have the numbers to inform us who the top sites were and how many people visited them. As you might expect, YouTube came in at the top of that list. In fact, four out of five online viewers were streaming videos from their site.

On average, each viewer streamed about 160 videos from the various sites. Nielsen can tell you who all the top sites were, but I’ll give you the top five according to unique viewers and total streams.

Top 5 Streaming Video Sites by Unique Viewers:

As I already mentioned, YouTube came in right at the top with over one hundred and sixty-three million viewers. Yahoo! surprisingly cam in second with forty-five million viewers, and VEVO came in third with forty-two million.

AOL Media Network comes in fourth with over twenty-five and a half million unique viewers throughout the month of May. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing was fifth with over twenty-four million unique viewers.

Top 5 Streaming Video Sites by Total Streams:

In this category, YouTube kicked everybody’s ass again. They streamed sixteen and a half billion videos in the month of May. Hulu was next with just under one billion videos.

VEVO took third in this category as well with seven hundred and twenty-seven million videos streamed. Yahoo! makes the list at number four with four hundred and thirty-four million videos, and AOL Media Network takes fifth with almost three hundred and thirty-one million videos streamed in May 2012.

It’s worth mentioning Netflix came in sixth place for total videos stream, but they didn’t even make the top ten for unique visitors. Facebook made both lists and had about 23 million unique visitors who streamed over one hundred twenty million videos.

So, those are the top sites. I am sure by next year Nielsen will inform us there are some new competitors. Either way, I don’t see YouTube falling prey to the competition anytime soon, they are leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else as it stands right now.