Online video which has gaining popularity and momentum especially when high speed broadband has reached a critical mass of Internet users, improved quality and an embrace by production companies to distribute their films and programs online, with the trends of Internet users that favor environment rich with interaction and user generated multimedia content. This is clearly proved in recent survey by New York-based Hitwise that collectively, traffic to the top 10 video Web sites increased 164 percent in the past three months.

According to Hitwise, video sharing site YouTube, which is both a video viewing site and social networking site, allows users to create their own profiles, post videos, and comment on each other’s posts, saw the most traffic among video sites with 43 percent of video market share, while the other competitors MySpace Videos at a distance 24% of video traffic, with Yahoo! Video Search, MSN Video Search and Google Video Search trailing behind in terms of video search. The video search market share of top 10 Internet video sites is as follow:

1. YouTube 42.94%
2. MySpace Videos 24.22%
3. Yahoo! Video Search 9.58%
4. MSN Video Search 9.21%
5. Google Video Search 6.48%
6. AOL Video 4.28%
7. iFilm 2.28%
8. Grouper 0.69%
9. Dailymotion.com 0.22%
10. vSocial.com 0.09%

On top of it, YouTube’s market share of visits has increased by 160 percent in the last three months. Other notable increase include MySpace Videos, which has increase in market share of 3,825 percent during the same period, Grouper (up 765 percent) and Daily Motion (up 300 percent).

Another aspect that worth mentioning is how long average a user spend on a video searching website. YouTube’s average session time for that week was 13 minutes 20 seconds, nearly three times greater than MySpace Video’s average session time at 4 minutes 41 seconds. However, Yahoo Video Search tops in average visit length rating with 15 minutes 2 seconds.

HitWise has also comparison between actual visits and page views traffics to top online video sites with some nice trend charts, which can be viewed HitWise blog (link dead).

You May Also Interested In: