Web traffic analyst firm Comscore has released their numbers for July and the most striking finding was that traffic to MySpace Video has doubled since June. Prime competitor YouTube saw a 20% increase according to Comscore, putting the site in the top 50 sites visited on the web. Still leading the online video pack? Yahoo! Video, with 21.1 million visitors, up 28-percent from June.
Traffic numbers are a real stab in the dark, and the last time we reported on Comscore numbers it was regarding Del.icio.us. Comscore showed a decline in the site’s traffic, owner Yahoo! insisted that the data was incorrect and Hitwise backed up Yahoo! statements with numbers last week.
What to make of it all? Well, throw in a giant grain of salt, but there are some tentative conclusions you could draw here. I think it’s an interesting quantification of the impact of MySpace’s video play, launched in January in competition with third party video services like YouTube. It also shows that those MySpace’s actions that have hurt the viral nature of third party services in the MySpace ecosystem have not stopped YouTube from seeing continued growth. You have to wonder about other companies launching today though, with MySpace being a less hospitable environment than it was when YouTube took off.
Ultimately though, just as the much beloved Flickr is far smaller still that the legacy site Yahoo! Photos (which is almost 10 times larger), so too is Yahoo! Videos the silent leader at the top of the heap while everyone is talking about the spread of innovation amongst its smaller competitors.
A related study by research firm InStat last week argued that they expect the market for online video to grow to ten times its current size over the next 5 years. Who will be the major players in that market? It may be tough for any particular feature set to overcome the momentum of the early movers. Will they be able to monetize their positions? The future of online video certainly looks like a fight. See also this morning’s post on the new partnership between three video startups, Eyespot, Blip.tv and Veoh.
I wonder of yahoo will insist the data is incorrect this time
Something is fishy about Yahoo!’s numbers in that press release. 21.1 million visitors?
The most viewed videos on YouTube this month have a range of 400k views to 2.9 million views. If the average person watches 2-5 videos a visit then YouTube’s 16 million would mean 32-80 million total video views. Which is possible looking at YouTube.com’s page counts.
Yahoo! Video on the other hand has low video view counts compared to their # of visitors. 21.1 million visitors watching 2-5 videos each means 42-105 million video views. Which is totally not possible unless there are tons of videos with about the same number of views. If you look at the view count of their most popular video it only has 743k views.
In conclusion to this long comment, either the press release has wacky numbers or the view counts on either yahoo or youtube are wacky.
Marshall, may I humbly suggest that in the future, when reporting on Comscore, Hitwise, etc, that it’s critically important to make clear what the audience is that is being measured. To say that Yahoo leads the online video pack, without disclosing that it’s a US-based measurement only, is potentially very misleading. Not everyone has memorized the various measurement methodologies of these ratings services.
Peter, thanks for the reminder. I’m thrilled that we have a global readership and I totally want to break that habit of not making US studies explicit.
These numbers are not very telling. If one person clicks ‘video’ by mistake on Yahoo then they get counted as a viewer. YouTube is still the place people go to find videos, with MySpace gaining ground.
Myspace? An abomination.
Myspace deleted my wildly popular profile without cause. In its short two month existence it garnered more profile views that many bands quickly reaching a 5 digit value. Its top viewed video, Midget Dancing, was the first video in myspace history to reach 3,000,000 views. It also beat everyone to 3,500,000 views. It was also the first video to have its own group — with 1,400 loyal minions.
I reported Tom, the founder, for “cyber bullying” to get a response. Deleting a profile without warning, and especially without justification is cyber bullying succinctly.
In their latest response to my entertaining email volley they wrote “sorry for the inconvenience”. If it were just that they’d be able to restore my profile from their backups.
A more interesting article will be on myspace’s foolish decision to avoid the industry standard practice of regular content backups….. and their apparent habit of deleting profiles that generate ad-impression-profit for myspace.
gross ineptitude? feckless marxist myspace minions?
you decide… after some investigating…. now watch their video traffic decline as I move to ply my Amazahzing powers elsewhere
myspace has far too many creepy inhabitants. Its steeped in ‘the culture of death’.
SECURITY and JUSTICE must be given to participants of suchs sites for them to flourish