Top 10 Video Sharing Sites on MySpace
October 26, 2006
Kelvin Beecroft, Mashable Labs
A guest post from Kelvin Beecroft of Mashable Labs.
Internet video has come of age. We watched for years as people tried to find a way to make Internet video useful. Sites like Movie.com were going to let us all watch movies over the Internet, but that was premature because we were all on dial-up at the time. Movie.com drifted into obscurity. Now, with the social web, people are eager to share and video is a good way to satisfy that desire. We have broadband to handle the payload and media companies aren’t so quick to destroy every Napster that comes along. It’s a climate ripe for growth and innovation.
Methodology
In this round-up we’re going to look at the top web sites having their video shared on MySpace. We’re not measuring video streams or how many hits a site gets because it’s easy to game that system. Instead, our approach is to look at pages created by MySpace users to see what they’re actually putting up on their pages.
We randomly sampled 1,201,651 MySpace pages evenly distributed according MySpace friendID numbers in the range of 1 to 118,500,000. The sample consisted of valid accounts which had not been canceled or deactivated. The sample consisted of public profiles, those not set to private.
We looked for video links in these pages to any of the video sharing sites in this round-up. If a page had links to multiple sites then that page was counted for each site. Multiple links to the same site on the same page were counted as only one link. Videos embedded in comments were excluded.
Results
YouTube and MySpace Video dominate. Together they account for over 83% of all video used on MySpace pages. At 44.07% YouTube leads MySpace which came in at 38.98%. The table shows the eclipse. Familiar names like Google Video, Grouper and Metacafe also make appearances, but the surprise entrant is VideoCodeZone, which rarely attracts any media coverage despite being popular with MySpace users.
Conclusion
Not surprisingly, there’s a glut of web sites offering free video to share on blogs and social web sites. Each wants to grab a piece of the pie and grow big before they drift into obscurity. Only a few will survive the shakeout and likely will be the ones already established, or those with deep enough pockets to play catch-up. Newer sites like Revver didn’t even make the top 10 list and must innovate or go the way of Movie.com into obscurity.
