Google may dominate around two-thirds of the search market, but the company’s grip around the online video market is tighter. Hitwise reports that YouTube and Google video combined grab over 77 percent of US video visits.
In March, YouTube snagged 73.18 percent of US visits, a 32 percent increase over March 2007. Despite decreasing by 52 percent, Google Video maintained third place at 4.06 percent, compared to 8.42 percent last year.
The drop in Google Video traffic is interesting but not unusual in the category overall. MySpaceTV, Yahoo Video, Break.com, MetaCafe and DailyMotion all bled a few visitors over the past year in a market that declined by seven percent in general. MySpaceTV fell 48 percent from March of last year to grab just 9.21 percent of the online video audience.
Perhaps surprisingly to some, Yahoo Video and Break.com are virtually neck and neck in the race, jockeying for 2.16 percent and 1.82 percent respectively. The rest of the top ten are lucky to grab one percent, with Blinkx rounding out the bottom with 0.58 percent.
Though YouTube and Google prove their dominance, the numbers show both how fragile the online video market is and how wide open it is to newcomers. NBC and Fox’s joint venture, Hulu, appeared on the list at number 22, just exiting beta on March 15. In two weeks, Hulu grabbed 0.22 percent of the market.
Though the number of video-site visitors overall has declined in the past year, the time spent has increased at these types of sites has increased by seven percent. Hitwise attributes many of these fluctuations to a change in how users are referred to video sites.
“As online video becomes more mainstream with internet users, the share of referred traffic from the younger audiences of social networks is declining, shifting instead toward search,” said Heather Dougherty, Hitwise’s director of research. “Integration into search engine result pages through universal and blended search is increasing both the exposure of online videos and the importance of search as a traffic driver in the online video category.”
