Methodology
Taking a sample of 200,143 videos currently being tracked by TubeMogul, we compared average cumulative views with respect to different video sites and categories. To prevent a video's age from skewing the averages, the time period was fixed at the first 90 days since the video was originally published. The following sites were compared: Crackle, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, MySpace, Revver, StupidVideos, Yahoo! and YouTube (newer TubeMogul partners such as Viddler, Howcast and Vimeo were excluded because we are just beginning to collect data for them).Results
Average 90 day cumulative views, broken down by site (and rounded to the nearest tenth):
| Site | Average Cumulative Views - 90 Days |
| YouTube | 3092.2 |
| Yahoo! | 699.9 |
| Veoh | 662.8 |
| MetaCafe | 518.2 |
| MySpace | 343.7 |
| DailyMotion | 219.9 |
| Revver | 188.9 |
| Crackle | 142.3 |
| StupidVideos | 126.1 |
Averages by video category:
| Category | Average Cumulative Views - 90 Days |
| Autos | 1501.8 |
| Entertainment | 1293.1 |
| Comedy | 1267.2 |
| Arts & Animation | 1106.3 |
| Animals & Pets | 1075.1 |
| Science & Technology | 794.6 |
| Sports | 745.1 |
| How-To | 432.4 |
| Video Games | 418.8 |
| Family & Kids | 328.1 |
| News & Blogs | 302.8 |
| Vlogs | 259.1 |
| Travel | 157.3 |
| Commercials | 124 |
A fuller breakdown of average views by category by site:
| Category | YouTube | Veoh | Yahoo! | StupidVideos | MetaCafe | MySpace | Crackle | DailyMotion | Revver |
| Arts & Animation | 5537.1 | 3271.8 | 1162 | 164.8 | 171.5 | 482.3 | 306 | 191.2 | 87.3 |
| Autos | 6567.9 | 1549.3 | 536.3 | 1.6 | 487.5 | 76.1 | 135.1 | 455 | 286.3 |
| Comedy | 5821.9 | 1410.1 | 1618.3 | 428.4 | 591.7 | 411.8 | 274.6 | 499.7 | 417.7 |
| Entertainment | 6194.6 | 1314.1 | 932.3 | 73.2 | 864.2 | 753.71 | 212.7 | 394.2 | 219.5 |
| How-To | 1994.8 | 47 | 391.2 | 32 | 630.8 | 325.1 | 104.8 | 100.1 | 185 |
| Music | 2180.3 | 606.5 | 664.9 | 85 | 259.4 | 541.9 | 193 | 214.8 | 123.7 |
| News & Blogs | 915.2 | 358 | 373.8 | 10.4 | 356.7 | 51.7 | 40 | 78.4 | 88.4 |
| Science & Technology | 3060.8 | 547.3 | 1305.3 | 0.3 | 318.1 | 435.4 | 36.3 | 93.6 | 350.2 |
| Sports | 2977.7 | 102.7 | 659.3 | 537.6 | 812.6 | 223.9 | 303 | 342 | 221.2 |
| Travel | 547.2 | 15.1 | 249.4 | 0.5 | 275 | 36.7 | 28.2 | 41.2 | 64.6 |
| Video Games | 1700.9 | 37.9 | 328.2 | 1.2 | 768.2 | 126.3 | 120.4 | 207 | 199.2 |
| Vlogs | 837.2 | 29.9 | 375.4 | 32.1 | 324.8 | 91.5 | 68.9 | 150.3 | 115.2 |
An example: "Comedy" vs. "How-To" videos. For "Comedy," Yahoo! and Veoh rank two and three, respectively, compared to MetaCafe and Yahoo! ranking two and three for "How-To," respectively.
Conclusions
YouTube's dominance is clear enough from the data, but equally interesting is the fierce competition on the periphery, with Veoh, Yahoo! and MetaCafe all vying for top spots. Out of 15 video categories, Yahoo! came in second place six times, followed by MetaCafe (five) and Veoh (four). MetaCafe's performance is particularly impressive, given that they have a stricter definition of what counts as a "view," only counting one per IP address (see our other research report here).Broken down by video category, some results are surprising. MySpace, for instance, only ranks fourth in the music category, behind YouTube, Yahoo! and Veoh, respectively. "Autos" received the greatest average views per video out of all categories in the sample, making car-related content perhaps the most neglected category out there. "News" having such a low average seems mostly to be caused by a glut in news content: 13.4% of all videos in the sample are categorized as news, making it the third most commonly-occurring category.
While YouTube dominates the averages, sites other than YouTube still control a great deal of the audience out there. Adding up the site averages, a video producer could almost double their audience by also distributing to the additional sites listed.
Works Cited:
- TubeMogul's proprietary data and our partners.
