Will The Real YouTube Please Stand Up

Comscore just released its Top 10 Video Ratings. According to Comscore in July:
Property              Unique U.S.          Streams Initiated               Streams per            
                           Streamers (000)      by U.S. Users (MM)      Streamer
--------                   ---------------              ------------------                  -----------

Total Internet     106,534                      7,182                           67.4
Yahoo! Sites       37,934                        812                            21.4
MySpace            37,422                       1,459                           39.0
YouTube            30,538                        649                             21.2
Time Warner Network  25,675                258                             10.1
Microsoft Sites    16,227                       156                              9.6
Viacom Digital     14,077                       322                             22.9
Google Sites       7,520                           60                              7.9
Ebaums World       7,143                        67                              9.4
MLB                        6,442                      30                             4.6
ROO Group Inc.     5,841                        186                          31.9

This puts YouTube in third place with 649m streams and less than 10% share. However, in June, YouTube claimed it did 2.5B streams and had a 43% share. Hitwise reported that it was actually a 29% share. You would assume that the June numbers would be less than the July ones reported by Comscore. Nielsen claims YouTube has 20m uniques a month and Comscore says 30m.

What amazes me is the wide divergence and rank between all of these. Granted, tracking streaming is a relatively new "science" compared to straight page views, but you would think, in this day and age, that things would be +/- 10%. Also, companies are always promoting and bending reality a bit but a 400% differential between Comscore and YouTube's claims is a bit much.

That said, I am a Yahoo fan and was glad to see that they are in the hunt though it is obvious from trends that YouTube and MySpace will be racing by them (if not already). Maybe Yahoo's challenge is that they need to capitalize a letter in the middel...YaHoo!

Comments

[Ranjit Mathoda]

Could the discrepancy simply be how YouTube videos on other sites are treated? YouTube has alot of videos that people watch on MySpace pages... if YouTube is counting that as their video served, and the independent measurement companies are counting that as a MySpace video served, that could account for the discrepancy.

[Pete]

Ranjit beat me to it. I think he is right.

[Michael Rubin, comScore]

Ranjit, Pete --

Actually, YouTube videos are attributed to YouTube even when they are embedded on other sites.

Here is a copy of the note from our release that explains this: "Streams are attributed to the property that provides the stream. For example, the YouTube data include streams that occurred on their Web property and on other properties whereby YouTube provided those streams."

...Michael

[Pete]

Michael, thanks for the clarification. I made a similar comment this morning over on Fred Wilson's blog, so you may want to clarify it there as well.

Pete