YouTube Falls to #3 Online Video Site

According to ComScore, YouTube has slipped to the #3 site for online video viewing. This news doesn’t count as a YouTube “bubble burst,” but you may want to revise your entry in the pool.

So here’s the poop according to MarketWatch’s Bambi Francisco. I’m not kidding. That’s her name:

• 3 out of 5 Internet users are watching online videos. We watched 7.2 billion videos in July- about two videos per day on average.
• Since there were 7,182,000,000 million streams initiated in July and 106,534,000 of us “unique streamers” we’re viewing 67.4 videos a month. Which I’m guessing is a very steep bell curve since there are lots of OCD viewers and probably a decent about of dabblers drawing the curve out.
• The number one site in July was MySpace (owned by News Corp). 37.4 million people watched 1.4 billion videos on MySpace, and that doesn’t include the embedded YouTube videos.
• Yahoo ranked number two with 812 million video streams, and number one by an inch for “unique streamers.” What’s a “unique streamer?” The video equivalent to “unique visitors” and sounds like “unique steamers.” I think Bambi made that term up. Maybe Thumper at Comscore.
• YouTube comes in with 649,000,000 videos “initiatied” and an average of 21 videos viewed per viewer. If I did my math right, they serve 11% of the videos That’s .7 videos a day. Did you watch your .7 YouTube video today?
• Interestingly Google ranks 8 for now, but remember they weren’t highlighting video results back in July. They’ll sneak up in August. eBaumsworld ranks nine. The rest of the sites are big media sites.
• Dear Comscore… please track consumer-generated video separately from media sites. Putting MySpace and YouTube next to VIacom and Time Warner is like comparing Amazon traffic to CNN.com.

YouTube’s data probably doesn’t jive with this. ComScore Media Metrix operates based on a sample of individuals. So I suppose it’s statistically valid but not bullet proof. The self-reported data from sites is always suspect, though, and it’s nice to have a neutral third-party represent data. I hope Hitwise refreshes its report since Hitwise monitors 10 million households in the U.S. via ISP data.