Facebook now 3rd most popular video site

The social network Facebook is currently the third most popular video source on the Web. According to a monthly video study by comScore, except for Google and Yahoo, it has surpassed all other media sites and video services.

In second place is Yahoo, which registered its biggest monthly boost, from 44.9 million unique viewers in June to 55.1 million in July based on comScore reports. Similarly, Microsoft sites including msnbc.com were up to 45.5 million in July from 38.9 million a month prior. However, Fox Interactive sites had the most significant drop, falling from 41.5 million to 38.1 million in just a month.

Surprisingly, Facebook statistics doesn’t include any of the embedded videos that users plant from other video services. If you drop a YouTube video into your Facebook feed, that counts for Google. Only videos updated through Facebook’s own video tool are counted by comScore, which means that the amount of video actually being consumed via Facebook is possibly far greater.

Despite Facebook’s momentum, it’s still going to be difficult to surpass Google. Powered by YouTube, Google not only maintains 144 million unique users, but users logged an average of 282 minutes — or 4.7 hours — during the month. Facebook’s average was 18.3 minutes in July.