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!
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.
Posted by: Ranjit Mathoda | September 27, 2006 at 01:29 PM
Ranjit beat me to it. I think he is right.
Posted by: Pete | September 27, 2006 at 02:14 PM
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
Posted by: Michael Rubin, comScore | September 27, 2006 at 04:20 PM
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
Posted by: Pete | September 28, 2006 at 07:42 AM