Dramatic YouTube

As in search, in Web video Google is the one to beat.

Americans viewed some 11 billion videos during July, and they watched most of them on Google sites, according to the latest metrics from comScore. Of the more than 11.4 billion videos viewed in the month, nearly 44 percent were seen on Google (GOOG) properties. And 98 percent of those were viewed on YouTube, which continues to dominate the online video space. The remaining 55.9 percent was split among nine properties led by Fox Interactive Media and MySpace (NWS), which ranked a very distant second to Google, with just 3.9 percent of videos viewed. None of the remaining eight sites even cracked three percent.

So who’s watching all this video?

Answer: nearly 142 million U.S. Internet users–almost 75 percent of Americans with Internet access. On average they spent 235 minutes watching video in July. And they rarely spent more than 2.9 minutes on any one video, which makes perfect sense when you think about it. “Dramatic Chipmunk” is just five seconds long, and I’m told it’s the greatest video on the Internet.