We all know that YouTube is the gorilla in the room but is it the right video sharing site for you? Maybe you’re a video blogger? Maybe you like to create short “How To” videos?

Luckily there are niche video sharing sites for virtually every type of video content out there. More than I could possibly profile here. Thanks to TubeMogul Research & Quantcast for providing much of the data needed for this profile. Here’s my breakdown with statistics and demographics for 15 of the more popular sites in alphabetical order:

5 Min.com

Description: Short “How-To” videos (under “5min”) that answer practical questions.

Gender Demographic: Male 55% / Female 45%

Age Demographic: 17% – 12-17 yrs / 33% – 18-34 yrs / 28% – 35-49 yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: Unavailable

Monthly US Traffic: 366,ooo

Blip.tv

Description: Publisher-friendly video sharing and distribution site with an integrated video blogging platform.

Gender Demographic: Male 57% / Female 43%

Age Demographic: 33% – 18-34 yrs / 33% – 35-49 yrs / 28% – 50+ yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 1.8 million

Monthly US Traffic: 766,000

Brightcove

Description: Great quality video with an easy to use, quick, user interface. Largely high-income and college-educated users.

Gender Demographic: Male 50% / Female 50%

Age Demographic: Evenly distributed between 18-34 yrs and 35-49 yrs age brackets.

Monthly Global Traffic: Unavailable

Monthly US Traffic: 1.9 million

** Should be noted that Brightcove is no longer a video sharing site (as mentioned in the comments) as of December 2008 and now is focused exclusively as a video hosting and distribution platform since January 2009. You can utilize their platform to upload to sharing sites such as Veoh.**

Crackle

Description: Easy to use but video quality could be better particularly since it is positioned as a multi-platform next-generation video network owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Gender Demographic: Male 50% / Female 50%

Age Demographic: 19% – 12-17 yrs / 39% – 18-34 yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: Unavailable

Monthly US Traffic: 2.5 million

Dailymotion

Description: Dubbed the “YouTube of Europe,” it’s a fairly simple and straight forward user interface but hasn’t developed a real community in the US…yet.

Gender Demographic: Male 59% / Female 41%

Age Demographic: 12% – 12-17 yrs / 40% – 18-34 yrs / 29% – 35-49 yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 48.2 million

Monthly US Traffic: 7.2 million

Google Video

Description:Why would you go to Google Video when there is (and Google owns) YouTube? Poor video quality leave this a brand for video search, not really for new video discovery.

Gender Demographic: Male 53% / Female 47%

Age Demographic: 26% – 12-17 yrs / 32% – 18-34 yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: Unavailable

Monthly US Traffic: 7.5 million

Metacafe

Description:One of the world’s largest video sites that specializes in short form video content from both new emerging talent and Hollywood’s heavy hitters. Uniquely controlled by the user community so if you have a good community, you can get your videos on the front page.

Gender Demographic: Male 58% / Female 42%

Age Demographic: 16% – 12-17 yrs / 36% – 18-34 yrs / 28% – 35-49 yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 43.5 million

Monthly US Traffic: 13 million

Motionbox

Description: One of the few video sharing sites that offers an option to securely share your videos with friends & family. After AOL Video shut down, they recommended their users to transfer their videos to Motionbox.

Gender Demographic: Male 52% / Female 48%

Age Demographic: 26% – 18-34 yrs / 31% – 35-49 yrs / 23% – 50+ yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 268,000

Monthly US Traffic: 144,000

Revver

Description: Revver pretty much started revenue sharing for video content providers. They connect makers,  sharers,  and sponsors  of internet video in a free and open marketplace that rewards them for doing what they do best.

Gender Demographic: Male 57% / Female 43%

Age Demographic: 36% – 18-34 yrs / 30% – 35-49 yrs / 23% – 50+ yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: Unavailable

Monthly US Traffic: 779,000

Ustream.tv

Description: Live interactive video broadcast platform that enables anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to quickly and easily broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size.

Gender Demographic: Male 55% / Female 45%

Age Demographic: 34% – 18-34 yrs / 33% – 35-49 yrs / 22% – 50+ yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 6.6 million

Monthly US Traffic: 1.4 million

Veoh

Description:Focused on full-screen video programming for anyone with a broadband connection. Site lacks a  sense of social community.

Gender Demographic: Male 56% / Female 44%

Age Demographic: evenly distributed audience across all age brackets.

Monthly Global Traffic: 12 million

Monthly US Traffic: 4 million

Viddler

Description:Coolest player interface with features like comments tied to a particular time in the video and automatic webcam synch.

Gender Demographic: Male 56% / Female 44%

Age Demographic: 39% – 18-34 yrs / 28% – 35-49 yrs / 20% – 50+ yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 2.1 million

Monthly US Traffic: 726,000

Vimeo

Description:Completely user-generated content used heavily by videobloggers and podcasters. Really quick upload and very hip interface. Largely high-income and college-educated users.

Gender Demographic: Male 65% / Female 35%

Age Demographic: N/A

Monthly Global Traffic: 9.5 million

Monthly US Traffic: 3.6 million

Yahoo! Video

Description: Entertainment-oriented video site. Unfortunately not yet fully integrated with all of Yahoo!’s community destinations and so really missing out on the social aspect to their service.

Gender Demographic: Male 55% / Female 45%

Age Demographic: 16% – 12-17 yrs / 41% – 18-34 yrs / 25% – 35-49 yrs / 16% – 50+ yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 3.2 million

Monthly US Traffic: 1.8 million

YouTube

Description: Unless you live under a rock you know who YouTube is. Their strong user base and community offers the greatest opportunity to both go viral in a big way…but also to get lost quickly.

Gender Demographic: Male 50% / Female 50%

Age Demographic: 19% – 12-17 yrs / 36% – 18-34 yrs / 23% – 35-49 yrs / 19% – 50+ yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 80.6 million

Monthly US Traffic: 69.3 million

According to a new survey by PermissionTV and reported on eMarketer, Marketers will increase their use of online video in 2009 (read their full article here). Here are some of the interesting statistics and trends they are predicting from this survey:

In the online survey of 400 senior marketing executives, nearly 2/3 identified online video as a primary focus of their 2009 digital marketing campaigns and budgets.  More than half are planning the launch of an online video campaign by the second quarter of 2009.

Brand awareness was listed by 71% of survey respondents as the biggest value of online video, followed by lead generation (47%), customer retention (44%), and customer conversion (41%).

Interesting to me was that e-mail was missing from the ad tactics respondents were asked about. Matt Kaplan, vice president at PermissionTV, told eMarketer that survey participants were not asked specifically about their e-mail budget plans. Although I believe e-mail marketing is a standard tactic for nearly all digital marketing campaigns and is especially effective when deploying an online video campaign. Who better to deploy an online video to and ask to forward it on to friends that a permission based e-mail list of contacts you already have a relationship with? The reason it was omitted was because spending on e-mail is far lower than for many other formats.This does make sense as E-Mail Service Provider (ESP) services are relatively inexpensive in the grand scheme of an online marketing campaign.

It will be interesting to see how 2009 pans out according to these predictions. It’s refreshing to see that brand awareness was the top reason for doing an online video marketing campaign as that is one of the strengths of online video. Those who put down lead generation, customer retention, and customer conversion will hopefully have some sort of statistics aggregation tracking in place as well as some sort of call-to-action either built into the video or somewhere around the video as this is critical to the success of any online video campaign.

How many views make a viral video a success?

How much of a typical online video is actually watched?

One of the frustrating things about online video view counting is YouTube and most other video sites count a “view” regardless of how much of a video is actually watched. So that got the research staff at TubeMogul thinking…how much are people actually watching before they click away?

The results from their study are pretty amazing: most online video viewers watch mere seconds, rather than minutes, of a video. All going back to the point I try to stress with every one of my clients that brevity is key. Click the image to see an enlarged graph of TubeMogul’s study findings.

For the full report from TubeMogul Industry Analysis, continue reading here. Here are some of the highlighted statistics that I found truly interesting:

Most videos steadily lose viewers once “play” is clicked, with an average 10.39% of viewers clicking away after ten seconds and 53.56% leaving after one minute.

I found this one surprising but not a complete shock. Most of our online marketing videos fall under 1½ minutes. The fact that over half of all viewers they sampled drop off after the first minute is interesting. How many were because the videos were incorrectly described or tagged and how many were just “casual browsers” checking out videos randomly. Properly titling, describing and tagging your video is one of the most important steps to getting found by the right people who are more likely part of that 46.44%. If they were looking for your content, they are far more likely to watch it to completion…as long as you keep it short.

A three minute video that has a post-roll ad in the final seconds, for example, will only be viewed by 16.62% of the initial audience, on average.Another takeaway is that overlay ads should be displayed as early as possible in a video, preferably within the first few seconds. On YouTube, where most overlay ads appear at about 10 seconds in, 10.39% of a video’s initial viewers are not likely seeing the ad.

Alright I’m going to go off on a little tangent here – I am not a fan of pre-roll or post-roll ads on video content. Personally I just think it is too much of an interruption to the viewer who clicked on a particular video to watch…NOT the advertisement tacked onto the video. I wonder how many viewers are clicking away because they are annoyed by the interruption of overlay ads on the video they are trying to watch? Especially if it is interfering with the content. Social networking on video sharing sites is all about inbound marketing or letting the community find the resources they are looking for by properly tagging videos with the keywords they will be searching for. Overlay ads to me are more of the old school of outbound marketing like television commercials, print ads, etc. a shotgun approach to hit as many people as possible with their sales pitch without regard as to whether it is hitting their target market or not. Sorry…my diatribe is over now. Anyway if you are going to engage on overlay advertising, this is a staggering reason why you shouldn’t even consider post-roll overlay advertising.

TubeMogul has once again impressed me with their industry leading research and produced some impressive results from their study. What about your own viewing habits? How long do you typically watch a video? How do you feel about overlay ads?

I was recently talking to a marketing firm that really doesn’t grasp the changing dynamic of the marketing environment online. They were still convinced that the best way was still the old way and they had little knowledge of email marketing, how to implement it and virtually no knowledge of how to utilize online social media. Which quickly made me realize that they must adapt and learn quickly or they may go the way of the dodo bird. Here’s why:

Think back to 1995…I know…I know it seems like a long time ago. I was just graduating from college with a degree in Visual Design. The college curriculum during the early nineties included very little computer design because…well…there weren’t many programs and most of the professors had no idea how to use the programs themselves.

• Adobe software programs that are design standards today like Photoshop & Illustrator were in their relative infancy. The majority of our design work and training was still a lot of paste up, photocopying and layout done by hand, not COMPLETELY on the computer as almost all design work is done today.
• The “home” computer was still relatively new as Windows 95 had not been released yet and most of our computer work was done in on-campus “computer labs” because few students could afford their own computer, much less the expensive software needed for design. The computers we did have in the computer labs were also notoriously slow. If you put a photo into the design you may as well ask the computer to slowly crash and die.
• The internet was also in it’s infancy for the home user as most web browsers were released to the public in 1995. So there was NO training in web site design. Most web developers at this time coded HTML using text editors. Web site design was not done visually until 1997 with the release of Macromedia’s Dreamweaver program.

All right, enough waxing nostalgic. So what’s your point, is what you are probably saying now. Well I’m getting to that.

14 years ago it was a much different world

After college I learned much of what I know by taking classes, learning on the job and teaching myself in my spare time. So I was able to survive and thrive with my own business doing graphic and website design. That’s not to say I’m the cat’s meow of design. Eric Guerin isn’t walking around talking about himself in the third person. There are many, many designers that are far more talented than I am BUT I can say that a number of people I graduated with and who were in the design field in the mid-nineties are no longer. Why? Because they didn’t change with the times and adapt to the new tools emerging.

Which brings me to today

We are on the precipice of another landslide change in how people are marketed to and how they interact with brands. People want to interact with the companies and brands they are passionate about online. That’s why there are over 70 million blogs worldwide and counting. Email Marketing is one of the simplest and easiest ways to keep in contact with your customers and help promote repeat business. Over 390 million consumers are at least watching video clips and listening to podcasts on a weekly basis. Social Media websites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter offer the business the ability to have individuals in their company interact with consumers and their brand identity on a 1on1 basis.

So the what is the moral to this story?

These social media tools are developing and growing in popularity at an alarmingly fast rate. If marketing firms, designers and even the individual business owner doesn’t take the time to educate themselves they could find themselves within a relatively short period of time falling victim to advertising natural selection.

If you haven’t visited the SmartMarket Movie site yet…go. Stop reading this dribble. If you have you know that all of the link buttons are related to television and movie themes (”Screening Room”, “The Producers”, etc.) So if you got here from our web site you know the link button was “Directors Cut” and my blog is of course “Eric’s Commentary”. Everyone who has rented a DVD knows a director’s cut is a specially edited version of a film where the director gets to put back in all the stuff that got left on the cutting room floor when they produce a movie and it needs to be edited for time, content, rating, etc.

The commentary on a DVD is a special track usually done by the director, producer or actor which is usually an entertaining look inside the movie making process and can give you all sorts of nuggets of information otherwise not disclosed to audience members. Most people probably don’t watch this unless you are a real film buff or love the movie you are watching.

So that is what this blog is going to be for me. Lots of information about online video, my inspiration, ideas and concepts for using social networking, statistics with a little pop culture thrown in just for fun. Enjoy!