Another comparison, another win for Google. In this case, the competition centers on online video, and in terms of market share (as determined by the number of visits), the search giant is 42 percent ahead of its nearest rival.
That rival would be MySpace, with 15 percent of the market (in July of this year). Yahoo trails by a bit with 12 percent, and MSN and AOL both have eight. That’s pretty sad, really – put into visual form, the data creates a pie chart in which a very large portion (57 percent) of the circle is covered by Google.
The numbers, which were researched by Compete’s Alex Patriquin, aren’t all that bad in another sense, however – the average number of visits per visitor to most of these leading video sites actually rose, or at least stayed roughly steady, between June and July. Predictably, Google led the way, but the only real loser was AOL, which appears to have lost about one-third of a visit (on a scale that didn’t need to go above five).
AOL also suffered in terms of unique visitors – that number declined between June and July. In fact, just about every site’s numbers went down in this respect, but Google remained well ahead in overall rankings, followed by Yahoo, MySpace, MSN, and AOL, respectively.
This data, by the way, all comes courtesy of “an improved methodology that reflects the latest industry trends,” according to Patriquin, who continues, “For starters, we peel back the label on several popular video sites to put them in a high-level competitive context. In addition to acknowledging Google’s ownership of YouTube, we credit Photobucket’s contribution to MySpace . . .”
But I’m left thinking that, pretty much whichever way you slice it, Google’s not doing too badly.
