Yahoo! Video and AOL Video are now more than popular than MySpace in terms of video-sharing sites. But, wait, more popular by what terms? Is that visitors and page views? Or will it be in terms of the time spent on the site?
Appears the news that MySpace has fallen is through "old school" Nielsen/NetRatings mentality. According to the story from Daisy Whitney at TelevisionWeek, YouTube dominates the heap with 51 million visitors for June, followed by Google Video at 18 million, AOL Video at 16 million, Yahoo Video at 15 million, and MySpace at 15 million. These are all unique visitors.
Whitney's story points out that Prom Queen was one of the major draws for MySpace, leaving one to wonder if traffic might fall in terms of video views on the site with the end of the first series run. At least until August, when the spinoff series Prom Queen: Summer Heat launches, as I wrote about in June.
Meanwhile, AOL continues to work on revamping its site and putting more emphasis on its video content, as I wrote about last week.
Earlier today, I wrote about the shift from number of views to length of views for Nielsen/NetRatings. I concluded:
I have to again emphasize, though, that a model in which time spent on a page is a measure of popularity might need to be thought through as well. I agree with Nielsen and the sentiments of many others that page views is not the best indicator of popularity for a site and for data for advertisers, but I'm quite a bit more reticent to move to this "time spent" model wholeheartedly. I think the key is that it's just not as simple for one quantifiable metric to explain all in terms of popularity, but that is the business Nielsen is in, so of course they will continue to try.
It will be interesting to see how the video site popularity looks after the switch to a "time-on-page" measurement of popularity, but I still feel that both types of data, on their own, are not capable of measuring what is the most popular video content online.
