Research - Most Popular Video Sites and Categories
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Last week, Tubemogul released new research that proves the current dominance of Youtube and demonstrates that videos on Youtube receive more views on average than other video sites, regardless of category. The research also demonstrates that while this is currently the case, other sites like Metacafe are quickly gaining momentum.For those of you that are unaware of Tubemogul, it is by far the best tool and service available to upload and track your video across multiple video sharing websites.
Below are the results of the research study:
YouTube’s market share is large, but less clear is whether a typical video uploaded to YouTube gets more views than videos uploaded elsewhere. Curious, we turned to the data, which is unequivocal: on average, videos uploaded to YouTube consistently get more views than any other site, regardless of category.
Methodology
Taking a sample of 200,143 videos currently being tracked by TubeMogul, we compared average cumulative views with respect to different video sites and categories. To prevent a video’s age from skewing the averages, the time period was fixed at the first 90 days since the video was originally published. The following sites were compared: Crackle, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, MySpace, Revver, StupidVideos, Yahoo! and YouTube (newer TubeMogul partners such as Viddler, Howcast and Vimeo were excluded because we are just beginning to collect data for them).
Results
Average 90 day cumulative views, broken down by site (and rounded to the nearest tenth):
Site Average Cumulative Views - 90 Days YouTube 3092.2 Yahoo! 699.9 Veoh 662.8 MetaCafe 518.2 MySpace 343.7 DailyMotion 219.9 Revver 188.9 Crackle 142.3 StupidVideos 126.1 Averages by video category:
Category Average Cumulative Views - 90 Days Autos 1501.8 Entertainment 1293.1 Comedy 1267.2 Arts & Animation 1106.3 Animals & Pets 1075.1 Science & Technology 794.6 Sports 745.1 How-To 432.4 Video Games 418.8 Family & Kids 328.1 News & Blogs 302.8 Vlogs 259.1 Travel 157.3 Commercials 124 A fuller breakdown of average views by category by site:
Category YouTube Veoh Yahoo! StupidVideos MetaCafe MySpace Crackle DailyMotion Revver Arts & Animation 5537.1 3271.8 1162 164.8 171.5 482.3 306 191.2 87.3 Autos 6567.9 1549.3 536.3 1.6 487.5 76.1 135.1 455 286.3 Comedy 5821.9 1410.1 1618.3 428.4 591.7 411.8 274.6 499.7 417.7 Entertainment 6194.6 1314.1 932.3 73.2 864.2 753.71 212.7 394.2 219.5 How-To 1994.8 47 391.2 32 630.8 325.1 104.8 100.1 185 Music 2180.3 606.5 664.9 85 259.4 541.9 193 214.8 123.7 News & Blogs 915.2 358 373.8 10.4 356.7 51.7 40 78.4 88.4 Science & Technology 3060.8 547.3 1305.3 0.3 318.1 435.4 36.3 93.6 350.2 Sports 2977.7 102.7 659.3 537.6 812.6 223.9 303 342 221.2 Travel 547.2 15.1 249.4 0.5 275 36.7 28.2 41.2 64.6 Video Games 1700.9 37.9 328.2 1.2 768.2 126.3 120.4 207 199.2 Vlogs 837.2 29.9 375.4 32.1 324.8 91.5 68.9 150.3 115.2 An example: “Comedy” vs. “How-To” videos. For “Comedy,” Yahoo! and Veoh rank two and three, respectively, compared to MetaCafe and Yahoo! ranking two and three for “How-To,” respectively.
Conclusions
YouTube’s dominance is clear enough from the data, but equally interesting is the fierce competition on the periphery, with Veoh, Yahoo! and MetaCafe all vying for top spots. Out of 15 video categories, Yahoo! came in second place six times, followed by MetaCafe (five) and Veoh (four). MetaCafe’s performance is particularly impressive, given that they have a stricter definition of what counts as a “view,” only counting one per IP address (see our other research report here).
Broken down by video category, some results are surprising. MySpace, for instance, only ranks fourth in the music category, behind YouTube, Yahoo! and Veoh, respectively. “Autos” received the greatest average views per video out of all categories in the sample, making car-related content perhaps the most neglected category out there. “News” having such a low average seems mostly to be caused by a glut in news content: 13.4% of all videos in the sample are categorized as news, making it the third most commonly-occurring category.
While YouTube dominates the averages, sites other than YouTube still control a great deal of the audience out there. Adding up the site averages, a video producer could almost double their audience by also distributing to the additional sites listed.
What do you think? ▼
About the Author - Mark R Robertson
Mark Robertson is the Founder and Publisher of ReelSEO, an online information resource dedicated to the fusion of video, technology, social media, search, and internet marketing. He is a professional online video marketing consultant and video SEO expert, popular speaker, and considered to be a passionate leader within the online video and search marketing industries. Follow Mark on Twitter (@markrrobertson), or Google+. - View All Posts By Mark R Robertson
