If you follow this industry long enough, you know the slightest alteration of any Google offering, from holiday logos to something between Sergey’s teeth, gets extensive coverage in the blogosphere. Google swapping out the Froogle link on its homepage for Video was another snoozer.
We made it our feature story. Apparently I’m the only one who didn’t care. As it turns out, I should’ve. Hitwise’s Bill Tancer weighs in today after discovering how promoting Google Video to the homepage transformed somewhere out there into a click frenzy.
Google Video traffic doubled.
“From another perspective,” says Tancer. “I looked at the percentage traffic that Google’s home page sent to the Video page before and after the link change. The chart below shows that Google Video’s traffic from the homepage surged from 50% to 70% in a single day.”
That boosted Google Video up two spots, from 5 to 7, among the company’s most trafficked services, and busted Froogle down two ranks, from 7 to 5.
We may see Google Video go higher yet as it becomes what David Utter described as Google’s “bigger boat”:
Video has become the big draw online given its growth in usage and popularity. Google’s deals, networking, and advertising expertise could combine to monetize video at a level no one has approached yet online.
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