Looking for dividends? Check out these companies

— -- Q: Which companies pay out the most money to shareholders as dividends?

A: Investors looking to squeeze any cash out of the companies they own are clinging to dividends.

No longer just the purview of retirees looking for cash, investors tired of watching their stocks flatline are looking for some tangible return. Demand for dividends is even more pronounced as large U.S. companies continue to post record profits, while investors get very little in return. Dividends are a way for investors to get a piece of the profit in their pockets.

Dividends aren't unusual, especially among the nation's biggest companies. Currently, 394 stocks in the Standard & Poor's 500 pay a quarterly dividend, up from 373 at the end of 2010, says Howard Silverblatt at Standard & Poor's Capital IQ.

But there's a tremendous gap between the payments by companies that treat dividends as a part of attracting investors and those that only pay them lip service.

But just because a company pays out an enormous dollar amount in dividends doesn't mean its dividend yield is particularly high. A dividend yield is the size of a company's dividend as a percentage of the stock price. A high dividend yield indicates that investors that buy the stock today receive a large dividend payout relative to the price paid for the stock. AT&T, for instance, has a relatively large dividend yield of 6.1%, which is high next to the roughly 2.0% dividend yield of the S&P 500. Exxon Mobil, though, is paying a dividend yield of 2.3%, which is about average.

Whether or not dividends will stay in style with investors will likely hinge on how well the stock market does. But in the meantime, investors will gladly accept the payments as they wait a better period for stocks.

Below is a list of the biggest dividend payers, by dollar amount (in billions), in the S&P 500, according to S&P Capital IQ:

Matt Krantz is a financial markets reporter at USA TODAY and author of Investing Online for Dummies and Fundamental Analysis for Dummies. He answers a different reader question every weekday in his Ask Matt column at money.usatoday.com. To submit a question, e-mail Matt at mkrantz@usatoday.com. Follow Matt on Twitter at: twitter.com/mattkrantz