I asked Nielsen//Netratings to pull some online video numbers for me. What they gave me amounted to sobering news for Yahoo, MSN, and everyone else hoping to compete in the online video wars:
It looks like a three-horse race between YouTube (Google), MySpace and Microsoft.
The numbers are below in an exhaustive chart that I’ve reformatted, so you can analyze them for yourself. But the bottom line is that in a year YouTube went from virtually no unique audience to a kingdom more than half the size of MySpace.
Other lessons from these numbers? Unless MSN, Yahoo and MySpace can come up with a stunning technological or interface advance, it might just be game over in video. If Google and YouTube can each keep its audience share, they’ll have three times the video audience of Microsoft, and about 2.5 times the video audience of MySpace.
That’s not completely insurmountable, but it’s quite daunting.
Selected Sites – Unique Audience (in thousands, U.S. Home and work)
| 7 | Site | Sep-05 | Oct-05 | Nov-05 | Dec-05 | Jan-06 | Feb-06 |
|---|
| 7 | Site | Mar-06 | Apr-06 | May-06 | Jun-06 | Jul-06 | Aug-06 | Sep-06 | % Change |
|---|
Selected Video Sites – YTD Unique Audience (in thousands, U.S. Home and work) Trend
| Site | Jan-06 | Feb-06 | Mar-06 | Apr-06 | May-06 | Jun-06 | Jul-06 | Aug-06 | Sep-06 |
*These
web sites do not meet minimum sample size standards. Projected and average
measures for these sites may exhibit large changes month-to-month as
a result.
**These
web sites have insufficient sample sizes for reliable projection of
audience size.
In an effort to provide
the most accurate and comprehensive data possible, the AOL Video channel has been temporarily removed from this list. The classification team was not satisfied that all AOL video-related Web traffic was being captured, so the channel will not be available until the appropriate definitional changes can be made.