New research by comScore has revealed that Facebook is growing faster than YouTube for watching online videos, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

About 41 million people - over thrice the number of last year - watched video clips generated by Facebook users in April, the comScore study said. In contrast, the video-sharing site YouTube grew 25 percent to 135 million unique viewers over the same period, the study said.

A similar report released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project on Thursday showed that social networking sites are becoming more popular than video-sharing sites for posting video clips.

About 52 percent of the respondents in the Pew survey said they upload videos to the web through social networks such as Facebook or MySpace. Less than 48 per cent said they did it through YouTube or Google Video services.

Currently, Facebook has the fifth-largest audience for web videos, according to ComScore.