-By Mike Shields, Mediaweek

NEW YORK Growth in the overall audience for online video has flattened over the past year, though consumption rose dramatically, according to the latest figures issued by comScore.

During this past April, 71 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience, or 134,471 million users, viewed online video.

In terms of percentage, that's down a few points from numbers issued by comScore back in May 2007 when 74 percent of Web users, or 132 million Americans, streamed videos on the Web.

However, while the number of total streamers appears to have leveled off after a rapid growth period, those streamers are watching more clips each year.

ComScore found that viewers averaged 82 clips per month and 228 minutes of video viewing in April, versus the 63 clips and 158-minute averages recorded nearly a year earlier. A whopping 11 billion videos were consumed in the U.S. in April 2008.

Nearly 38 percent of those 11 billion videos were viewed on Google properties. In fact, users streamed 4,159,850 clips on Google's sites during the month (98 percent of which can be attributed to category dominator YouTube). That represents an increase of nearly 133 percent since May '07.

Some of Google's share growth appears to be coming at the expense of News Corp.'s MySpace. That social networking site is the core video property within Fox Interactive Media, which saw its total number of video streams dip to 557,663 in April 2008 (5.1 percent) versus 680 million streams in May of last year. Yahoo! also saw its total video figures drop slightly from 387 million streams last May to 352,359 this past April.

In terms of unique viewers, Google sites similarly dominated, as they drew 83.7 million uniques in April versus 52 million uniques on Fox sites (46 million on MySpace specifically) and 37.3 million on Yahoo! sites.