The good news for Google keeps coming from comScore. Yesterday, comScore revealed that despite a slight dip in search marketshare in June, Google’s lead over second place Yahoo! in the search engine wars remained virtually unchanged (Microsoft was the only search gainer for the month among the top 5). Today, the metrics firm released numbers showing just how thoroughly Google is dominating the online video space.
In May 2007, Google sites (primarily YouTube) streamed nearly 1.8 billion videos, good for 21.5% of the US market. Their next closes competitor, Fox Interactive (primarily MySpace Video) streamed just 680 million — or 8.1% of the US market.
Interestingly, Fox is not that far behind in streamers (unique visitors who viewed at least one video stream), trailing Google by just 9 percentage points. My quick math estimates that YouTube viewers are watching an average of just under 28 videos per month, while MySpace Video viewers watched about 12 videos each in May. Why the large gap between the two sites? My guess is that MySpace, which overall remains the stickier site, offers a lot more than video and is used primarily by its viewers for things other than video (further, many MySpacers still embed YouTube clips in their profiles).
Some other eye popping figures: 75% of Americans watched video online in the past month, and 1 in 3 did so on YouTube. The average video streamer consumed well over 2.5 hours of online video (I confess that I’ve watched probably more than that in the past month, thanks in part to an always enlightening and entertaining Guy Kawasaki-hosted roundtable discussion). The average video consumer watched more than 2 videos per day, which unless my math is totally batty means that most people are using more than one site (and probably more than two) to get their online video fix.
As we reported last week, Hollywood is taking online video more seriously, and according to ABI Research, there will be nearly 1 billion online video consumers by 2012. As the audience for Internet video and user generated content grows, Google’s mega acquisition of market-dominating YouTube, which accounts for about 95% of the company’s video streams, last fall looks more and more wise.
