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YouTube Hits 100m Videos per Day, 29% Market Share

By: The Online Reporter
Publish Date: July 22, 2006

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If the Internet is the future for distributing videos, then it's YouTube.com that has the jump on the likes of iTunes, Yahoo, Google, MSN and CinemaNow for early market share dominance. The free-to-post and free-to-view YouTube, which is just over a year old, says its users are now downloading more than 100 million videos per day, up from three million in December. It's doubtful if any TV channel gets that many viewers, perhaps only on a Super Bowl Sunday. It's the leading Net video site in the States with a 29% market share, according to Hitwise, which monitors Internet traffic. Market Share Week Ended July 8, 2006 Online Video Sites Ranked by Market Share of Total Visits Rank Name Domain Market Share 1 YouTube www.youtube.com 42.86% 2 MySpace Videos 27.36% vids.myspace.com 3 Yahoo! Video Search 7.22% video.search.yahoo.com 4 MSN Video Search 6.71% video.msn.com 5 Google Video Search 5.10% video.google.com 6 AOL Video 4.37% us.video.aol.com 7 iFilm www.ifilm.com 1.86% 8 MetaCafe www.metacafe.com 1.69% 9 Grouper www.grouper.com 0.48% 10 GoFish www.gofish.com 0.33% 11 Dailymotion.com 0.32% www.dailymotion.com 12 vMix www.vmix.com 0.31% 13 ROO TV www.rootv.com 0.28% 14 Guba.com www.guba.com 0.17% 15 Veoh www.veoh.com 0.15% 16 Porkolt www.porkolt.com 0.14% 17 Red Balcony 0.12% www.redbalcony.com 18 videovat.com 0.12% www.videovat.com 19 EVTV1 www.evtv1.com 0.09% 20 Revver www.revver.com 0.07% 21 Vimeo www.vimeo.com 0.06% 22 UnCut Video 0.05% communityvideo.aol.com 23 vSocial.com www.vsocial.com 0.05% 24 Ourmedia www.ourmedia.org 0.04% 25 CastPost.com DNR www.castpost.com 26 Clipshack DNR www.clipshack.com 27 eefoof www.eefoof.com DNR 28 eyespot Mixer DNR www.eyespot.com 29 VideoEgg www.videoegg.com DNR 30 Lulu TV www.lulu.tv DNR Source: Hitwise (www.hitwise.com) According to YouTube, its viewers watched 2.5 billion videos last month. The company calculates that's about 60% of all videos watched online in the US. Nielsen//NetRatings says YouTube has almost 20 million visitors to the site each month. The Two Sectors of the Online Video Market Free Paid Length short movies, TV shows Dominant humor, music the full gamut Genre Source user-generated movie & TV & professionally studios produced Leading YouTube iTunes Sites AtomFilms Movielink MySpace CinemaNow By any measure, YouTube owns the Internet video market, although it does not offer any for-pay downloads such as movies and TV shows. It offers short-form videos that are predominantly user-generated or, in many cases, professionally produced videos that have been user "edited." YouTube has both the lead and the momentum. Visits to the site were up 87% from April to June, while visits to the all video Web sites were up only 30%, according to LeeAnne Prescott, senior research analyst at Hitwise who said YouTube's growth is outpacing the entire category. Content owners once fought the pirated clips that end up on YouTube, but that's changing. The NBC TV network recently inked a deal to use YouTube to post videos that'll promote its prime-time shows. Chad Hurley, who co-founded YouTube with Steve Chen, told the AP, "There is a big wave of video coming online and these media guys want to work with us to stay relevant in this changing marketplace. This trend in the Internet isn't changing, so we are working with them to find solutions on how they can embrace what we are doing and really leverage that to help their business." YouTube says it's still working out how it'll "monetize" its site. Possibilities include showing ads on the side of the videos à la Google or payments by content owners to publicize their offerings. Another possibility is to splice video ads into the videos, although having them at the video's beginning would be off-putting to many YouTube fans. Advertising is a tricky issue for YouTube. With a Web site that allows anyone to upload a video, regardless of who owns the copyright on it, YouTube has to avoid being accused of copyright infringement. To that end, it removes any video that draws a copyright complaint. That allows YouTube to claim it's a service provider, not a content provider, and perhaps delay the lawsuits that are certain to come. YouTube also monitors uploaded videos for legality and obscenity. Many videos are out-and-out rip-offs, such as excerpts from TV shows. Sometimes they are doctored with user-added extras. Following YouTube in second space with a 19% market share for video viewing is the social networking site MySpace, according to Hitwise. MySpace was the source for more than 20% of YouTube's traffic in February and March. It then decided to try to keep the traffic at home and launched its own video-sharing service. MySpace users can now place a video link on their profile pages, although that's not as universally available as YouTube.com. YouTube also has a major advantage over MySpace, its viewers spend three times as much time on each video. That, says Hitwise, demonstrates "a high level of engagement between YouTube's content and its visitors." Yahoo, MSN, Google and AOL fall into the also-ran group with anywhere from 3% to 5% market share. Internet Video Market Grows 164% The 10 leading video sites increased 164% between February and May of this year, according to Hitwise. Visits to YouTube increased 160% during the three-month period. Two years ago, few consumers thought about the Net as a source for video. Today, it's estimated that there are over 200 Web sites that offer video, according to a report from Rider Research called "Video Vision." "The rapid growth of online video sites in the past six months demonstrates a major shift in online behavior," said Prescott. "The Internet is quickly moving from static Web pages to an environment rich with interaction and user-generated multimedia content." User-generated and user-modified videos have spurred the growth of video on the Net. As with what ultimately happened to movies and TV shows, consumers are going to expect better. The question now is how YouTube and the others video Web sites can find and legally offer the next-generation of online videos without becoming pawns of the major studios. The big video producers are just now turning their attention to the online video sites.