We know that internet video has really taken off but just take a look at the growth of some example video related sites. The growth of video sharing sites like YouTube and Metacafe are phenomenal.
Now we are also beginning to see the growth of video search engines that index video from a variety of sources. These video search engines are lagging behind the major video sharing sites, but will these search engines ever catch them up?
graph courtesy of alexa
YouTube.com
The leading website for sharing and watching online video clips. The company was recently sold for $1.77 billion to Google. It now ranks as the 4th busiest site on the internet and receives an estimated 20 million unique users per month, but it could be over 30 million by now. YouTube was officially launched in December 2005 and has seen huge growth since the middle of 2006.
Metacafe.com
Metacafe is much like YouTube and is a website for sharing and watching online video clips. Metacafe has about 17 million unique users each month and is ranked as the 132nd busiest site on the net. It was founded in July 2003 and has experienced a similar growth spurt as YouTube.
SearchforVideo.com
SearchForVideo.com is a video clip search engine indexing videos and associated metadata from around the web. It was launched in August 2005 and is now the 11,631st busiest site on the internet and has undergone significant growth since the middle of 2006, approximately 1 year after the original burst of interest in online video sites. This growth has occurred with very little promotion or press attention. I estimate that SearchForVideo.com has 1 million unique visitors a month.
SearchVideo.com
SearchVideo.com is much like SearchForVideo.com and is a video clip search engine indexing videos and associated metadata from around the web. It is ranked as the 18,581st busiest site in Alexa with an estimated 0.7 million unique visitors a month despite very little promotion or news coverage.
Blinkx.com
Blinkx is a video search engine that was launched in 2004 and differs from other video search engines in that it uses speech recognition and visual analysis to process spidered video rather than relying on metadata alone. Blinkx has seen steady growth (although not as dramatic as competitors) since its launch. It is now ranked as the 7,300th busiest site on the net. I’d make a rudimentary guess that this equated to anything up to 2 million unique visitors a month.
Video Search Engines
These examples are by no means comprehensive and there are plenty more video search engines out there. Even Google Video looks to be shifting from a closed system to an open video search engine.
The question is will these video search engine manage to attract the mass amount of users that sites like YouTube, MetaCafe and DailyMotion have, or will web surfers stay loyal to their chosen video sharing community?
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