Lots of attention is being paid to a recent story by Bambi Francisco at Marketwatch (on a completely unrelated note, Bambi Francisco is one of my favourite names, as I may have mentioned before), in which Ms. Francisco reports that MySpace has eclipsed YouTube when it comes to numbers of video clips shared.
According to statistics from ComScore Media Metrix, 37.4 million individual users watched more than 1.4 billion video clips on MySpace in July, which put it ahead of YouTube, Yahoo and Google in terms of unique video streams (Yahoo was actually ahead in terms of actual users who watched video, with almost 38 million, but it only served up about 800 million clips during the month). ComScore says that July saw a mind-boggling 7.2 billion video streams viewed.
But wait. Blogger Greg Sterling notes that Hitwise has completely different numbers. In August, Hitwise says YouTube was by far the bigger draw, with more than 45 per cent of the traffic to Internet video sites. MySpace came in a distant second with 23 per cent, with Google Video at just a little over 10 per cent. VC Confidential has some thoughts about the difference in stats between Hitwise and ComScore, an issue that has come up more than once in the past.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has launched its own would-be YouTube killer known as Soapbox. In related news, Yahoo has bought an online video-editing startup called JumpCut.
