Over at NewTeeVee, Om and Liz share some interesting data on the relative market shares of the top video sharing sites. In particular, Compete.com has produced a market share analysis of the top 20 video web sites.
What’s interesting about the Compete.com data are how the rankings differ from Compete’s own ranking data produced at the Compete site (admittedly the market share analysis appears to be a special study, not something pulled from Compete’s search engine tool) and how completely different the data are from the leading web-based traffic measurement tool, Alexa (which has lots of well-documented methodological flaws).
Although Compete’s market share data don’t list ManiaTV among the top 20 sites, the Compete.com rankings show ManiaTV as the third most-visited web site (not including MySpace, AOL, Google and Yahoo). Although most of the top 20 sites in the market share analysis match up with the rankings pulled from the site, the order of the site varies substantially between the two sets of measurements.
For example, although Compete’s market share analysis puts TopTVBytes as the second most highly trafficked site, the rankings pulled from the Compete.com site puts TopTVBytes at number ten.
| Video Sharing Sites Ranked by Compete.com, Alexa | |||||
|
# |
Site | Compete.com Rank December 2006 | Site | Alexa 3 Month Average Site Ranking as of 2/3/06 | |
| 1 | YouTube | 16 | YouTube | 5 | |
| 2 | TopTVBytes | 339 | MetaCafe | 133 | |
| 3 | ManiaTV | 368 | Daily Motion | 144 | |
| 4 | Bolt | 559 | Break | 291 | |
| 5 | ebaumsworld | 635 | ebaumsworld | 834 | |
| 6 | Stupid Videos | 636 | livevideo | 940 | |
| 7 | Break | 647 | iFilm | 957 | |
| 8 | iFilm | 655 | Veoh | 1,233 | |
| 9 | Daily Motion | 701 | PutFile | 1,377 | |
| 10 | livevideo | 837 | Bolt | 1,398 | |
| 11 | MetaCafe | 1,033 | GoFish | 1,787 | |
| 12 | AddictingClips.com | 1,513 | vSocial | 1,944 | |
| 13 | Code Zone | 2,356 | Revver | 2,791 | |
| 14 | PutFile | 2,423 | Grouper | 2,938 | |
| 15 | Guba | 2,608 | ZippyVideos | 3,307 | |
| 16 | brightcove | 2,741 | brightcove | 3,511 | |
| 17 | hallpass | 2,862 | Guba | 3,885 | |
| 18 | GoFish | 3,256 | TopTVBytes | 4,080 | |
| 19 | Grouper | 3,679 | VidiLife | 4,380 | |
| 20 | blastro | 4,562 | Yikers | 5,774 | |
| MySpace, AOL, Google and Yahoo excluded due to inability to pinpoint | |||||
| traffic for video sharing on these sites. | |||||
Beyond the discrepancy between two sets of data from the same company, Compete.com and Alexa produce radically different results. I pulled the rankings from both sites for 46 video sharing sites and the results are remarkable (see table at end). Both sources rank YouTube number one, but there the similiarities end.
The Alexa rankings show Veoh as the 10th-ranked video site, while Veoh falls 25th on the Compete.com site. Another example highlighting an even bigger discrepancy: while Alexa’s ranking puts CodeZone dead-last in the list, Compete.com’s ranking puts it 13th among the 46 sites.
These disparate rankings underscore the need for better web metrics — in general and for video sites in particular. Other sources of video site usage data include Hitwise and comScore (Liz offers some new comScore data that, while not rankings per se, show some recent audience statistics for video sites.) And Nielsen Media Research has promised to produce viewership stats for the web that are on par with what they produce for traditional TV.
Until then, however, it looks like stats for web video site usage will remain all over the map.
Political activism has been given a shot in the arm by the Internet, a truism that is fleshed out in this piece by Jennifer Earl, Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara, which appears in tomorrow’s Washington Post.
Last week’s United for Peace and Justice anti-war rally on the Mall would have been much more difficult to pull off without the range of web-based tools, including online printable flyers, Facebook and MySpace gizmos and maps, used by the organizers. Online petitions are playing a growing role in social and political activism, thanks to a web sites such as PetitionOnline.com, which has housed tens of thousands of petitions (not all of them political, either) and garnered 47 million signatures since its founding in 1999.
The web’s ability to “streamline” activism could lead to greater political involvement by young people (“the point and click generation”), Earl contends.
As some types of online activism allow people to take part quickly and easily , it opens the door for broader changes, shifting how regularly people take part in political actions. Such streamlined activism may lead to more frequent, and more committed, political engagement on the part of everyday citizens. And politicians seeking donations, votes and other kinds of support may look to tap into this new generation of self-selected, point-and-click activists. Much like the Web, these online petitions are an end in themselves as well as a gateway to new kinds of action.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:12 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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