Traffic analysts Hitwise released new numbers today indicating that while online video sites as a category have seen a 7% drop in traffic year over year since March 2007 - YouTube has seen a remarkable 32% growth in visits during that period. YouTube's market share in the video sector is now at 73.18%, Hitwise reports.
That's significantly higher than Google's all-time market share high-point among search engines. Google saw an all-time high 67% of searches performed in March, also according to Hitwise.
Below are the Hitwise charts for the top 5 video sites and for the top 5 independent video sites. It is worth noting that ad networks report a seeing a substantial number of viewers on niche video sites - Hitwise here includes only general interest video sites. Thus these numbers cannot be used to conclude that there is no Long Tail in online video in general - that's a separate question. The point is that among general interest sites, there is effectively no Long Tail.
The numbers presumably do not include viewership of videos embedded on third party websites like blogs, a factor that would undoubtedly only make YouTube's dominance bigger if it were to be included. That advantage is likely to increase even further if the new YouTube API is a success.
The reported drop in total video viewing online seems remarkable as well. Hitwise says that this category of sites made up 1.09% of US website visits last month, down 7% from 1.16% in March of 2007. Why is video dropping? Perhaps audiences are deciding that there's nothing on anywhere but YouTube, perhaps they are excited that the TV writers' strike is over and are paying extra close attention to that medium.
The biggest takeaway really does seem, though, to be that though "Googling" is a verb for search - the company's market share dominance is substantially higher in online video.
