I ran across this interesting diagram from comScore on the top video properties online:
|
Top U.S. Online Video Properties* by Unique Viewers |
||
|
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.