At last Hitwise does a public ranking of the online video sites. I use Hitwise in my day job (the company track about 25 million Americans web habits by buying ISP data). However I can't release any of the rankings. Now it's public!
Some highlights & observations:
- YouTube is obviously number one- with 42% market share and an average visit of about 13:20. These "average visit" numbers are less reliable that actual log traffic that measures a "mean visit," and tends to overstate them. Still- that's a nice chunk of time.
- The second highest share is just more than half of YouTube's… MySpace comes in at 24%.
- Yahoo video is ahead of MSN video AND Google video by a few percent. They had a lead, so that doesn't surpise me. Now that Google videos are showing up in Googles search, we'll see that change in the next months.
- DailyMotion, while being low on the list, has a decent average visit number.
- Revver (and CubeBreak) aren't tracking high- mostly because Revver is doing almost no promotion since it's still in beta. Plus- Hitwise would not necessarily track most of the videos viewed via Revver since Revver's strategy is to deploy its videos on other sites.
This quote kinda summarizes why I created this Blog: "The rapid growth of online video sites in the past six months demonstrates a major shift in online behavior" said LeeAnn Prescott, senior research analyst at Hitwise. "The Internet is quickly moving from static web pages to an environment rich with interaction and user generated multimedia content."
The visit length being so much higher on Y! and YourTube is very interesting…How come Nalts…is it because thier films are longer, do they have more stuff so people stay, ad format, better quaility?
Good question, Jack- and here’s my theory. Both of those sites have a lot of content conveniently sorted by users. So they make it easy for people to find good content quickly. The other sites require some digging. I also think YouTube’s popularity helps. Popularity means that you get the highly engaged viewers who will sit through a 15 minute film short or piece from an SNL they missed. It’s kinda like Medscape’s duration of visit for physicians is higher than other sites- maybe it’s correlated with being the market leader. As you know, duration can be skewed by people that just leave their browser on YouTube for hours. I like looking at mean visit duration, but Hitwise doesn’t report on that.