NEW YORK: Online video views were up 40 percent in March over last year, Nielsen said today. The company’s analysis of online video consumption indicated that there were more than 9.6 billion streams watched by about 130 million people. The stream figure is a 9 percent jump over February when 8.9 billion streams of video were viewed by 127.6 million people. The average time per viewer was up almost 13 percent month-to-month, from 169 minutes total to 191 minutes.

For sourcing, YouTube was far and away at the top, with 89.4 million people watching 5.5 billion streams. Hulu was next, with 8.9 million people watching 348.5 million streams. Yahoo! Brought in 24.8 million people who watched 232 million streams. Fox Web sites had 14.7 million folks who watched 208.5 million streams. Nickelodeon had 6.4 million visitors watching 196.2 million streams. ABC, MSN, Turner, MTV and CNN sites rounded out the top 10.

CBSSports.com was conspicuously absent from the list even after the platform logged record traffic during March Madness. CBS’s dedicated media player had 7.52 million visitors who watched a total of 8.6 million hours over the course of the tournament, which ran from mid-March through early April. -- Deborah D. McAdams