Move over hockey. Canadians are embracing a new national pastime: YouTube.

When it comes to watching online video, as with hockey, Canada is a world leader.

Seventy-one per cent of Canadian Internet users, or 17.6 million people, visit YouTube every month, according comScore, a company that specializes in measuring digital activity.

Once on the site, they spend an average of 292 minutes a month watching videos such as Classified's "O Canada" or the "Bed Intruder Song," two of the most popular videos in Canada in 2010.

In November, that translated into two billion videos viewed.

In comparison, 55 per cent of the American online population surf YouTube monthly, comScore said.

Canada also beats out every other G7 nation, according to the company.

It's a result that doesn't surprise comScore's Canadian VP Bryan Segal.

"When it comes to communication, when it comes to Facebook, when it comes to a lot of these web 2.0 tools, community-based, Canadians are really highly sophisticated."

And the growth isn't limited to YouTube, he said. Canadian broadcasters, such as CBC, CTV and Global have seen steady growth in the number of people watching their content online, according to comScore's analysis.

"We are content-heavy and media-heavy and I think that is one of the great things about our country," he said.

Canada has also long been known as the world's top Facebook nation with 83.1 per cent of the online population on the popular social-networking site.

In the U.S., Facebook has 71.5 per cent reach of the online population.

More Canadians have also mastered the 140-character tweet than Americans, with 13.7 per cent on Twitter monthly compared to 11.3 per cent in the U.S.

The size of the Canadian population, the expanse of our land mass and the reach of our broadband penetration has spurred the online migration of Canadians, who are now venturing deeper into the cyber space, Segal said. "Where penetration has remained fairly flat over the past few years, time spent and video usage has really exploded," Segal said.

Catherine Middelton, a Canada research chair in communication technologies in the information society at Ryerson University, says the data should be taken with a grain of salt because there isn't enough detail to draw any definitive conclusions.

"You have a window into understanding what's happening, but it's only a window," she said.

The biggest Canadian YouTube junkies are those between 18 and 24 — an age category that clocks an average of 360 minutes on the site each month.

They are followed by young people under the age of 17 who watched an average of 350 minutes of YouTube per month.

YouTube use seems to fall with age. Canadians between the ages of 25 and 34 watch 338 minutes a month, those aged 35 to 54 watch 297 minutes and people over 55 spend 155 minutes passing time on YouTube.

As for our national obsession with hockey, online video is feeding it.

NHL.com is one of the most visited websites in Canada, Segal added.

rlindell@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/rebeccalindell