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Where are all the video startups? Maybe Content=King, online and offline

I ran across this interesting diagram from comScore on the top video properties online:

Top U.S. Online Video Properties* by Unique Viewers
April 2008
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore Video Metrix

Property

Unique Viewers (000)

Average Videos per Viewer

Total Internet

134,471

81.6

Google Sites

83,720

49.7

Fox Interactive Media

52,046

10.7

Yahoo! Sites

37,323

9.4

Microsoft Sites

29,908

9.0

Time Warner – Excl. AOL

20,627

6.7

Viacom Digital

19,367

10.3

AOL LLC

19,115

5.0

Disney Online

10,805

9.1

ESPN

9,026

9.2

CBS Corporation

7,993

7.1

My first thought was… why are there no startups on this list? YouTube is the closest, and obviously they are dominating, but how about all the other folks?

A theory on this is that most startups have focused on aggregating long-tail video online, and displaying it as a "content site" similar to YouTube. That is, one would focus on just aggregating and displaying content, rather than building too much complexity on top of it.

Compare this strategy to the one employed by many of the top media companies listed above – they are taking their wells of proprietary content and posting it online, and mainstream content is able to drive traffic with or without surrounding featureset. If you check out ABC.com or many of the major network sites, they don't do anything fancy – just post the content in Flash and off you go. It really makes you believe that content is king, both online and offline.

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