In April we reported that YouTube's dominance in online video was bigger than Google's dominance in search (67%). The new Hitwise numbers raise a number of questions for us.

Hitwise reports that overall video viewership in May of this year fell 9% compared to May of last year, but times on site grew 6%. That's strange. We've asked whether the rapidly growing Hulu is included in this batch of numbers and will update this post when we get a reply. (Update: Hitwise says that Hulu is now the 13th most watched video site and is seeing consistent growth each month.) Could it be that last year saw a large number of people checking out online video for the first time, only a certain percentage of them found that they liked it but those people are now watching more than before? If readers have any theories why the video market is declining in absolute number of viewers, we'd love to hear them.

YouTube's huge dominance over a market that includes a wide variety of different video sites, each with different communities and feature sets, probably does not bode very well for innovation in the sector. We'd love to see more people checking out innovative services like Metacafe, Blip.tv and others. We wrote about the top video content producers in the world yesterday, many of which are bigger in places other than YouTube. Smaller up and comers outside of YouTube deserve some attention, too.

Somehow Metacafe has a much lower idiot-to-civil commenter ratio than YouTube, where we can only imagine what kind of disaster such an experiment could lead to. For MetaCafe, though, this could be another experiment that works out really well.

Hiting the "edit options" button that appears above every video leads to three buttons appearing. Edit video details, translate and "advanced wiki." The advanced wiki is a MediaWiki page dedicated to discussion about each video. Unfortunately editing those pages requires another account creation and login. We don't expect to see them utilized extensively.

MetaCafe's History of Experimentation

MetaCafe is no clone of YouTube. The company was offering a revenue share to a large portion of their top users since October 2006 through the successful Producers' Rewards program.

Unlike YouTube, MetaCafe said it had an exclusive focus on user generated content. And most unlike YouTube, the company employed an army of video editors to vet, highlight and keep an eye on all the content coming through the site. All of these strategies have worked quite well for the company, whose founders have cashed out to investors, as well.

But a Wiki for Video Metadata?

Could this possibly work? There's no clear explanation yet about how the site will handle versioning or the other nitty gritty of the wiki way - but we're sure they've got plans. The prospect of users enriching show descriptions and categorization is a really exciting one.

Translation of metadata from one language to another is a valiant idea - but translation is something that other sites like DotSub (subtitles) and Lingro (dictionaries) have figured out great ways to do already. We have a hard time imagining that the translation that can go on at MetaCafe will come close to what can be done by those other communities.

Who knows where it will all lead, though. It's a brave step by MetaCafe. Who's next to allow users to edit file metadata?

The highlights? YouTube viewership grew 9% according to Nielsen, Metacafe grew 27% and Yahoo! Video viewership fell by an amazing 60%.

My takeaways from these numbers? There's plenty of room for change in this market, as expected the TV writers' strike may be increasing online numbers, look out for Metacafe and don't assume that YouTube's growth will slow.

If you're interested in the online video market, you should make sure you're subscribed to the feed for NewTeeVee, the GigaOm network's video news blog.