Video Search has continued to take off since my post on the Chinese Students Singing Backstreet Boys. Visits to Google Video search have increased by 48% for the week ending 12/24/05 compared to the week of that post (week ending 11/12/05), and visits to Yahoo! Video Search were up 14% in the same period.
But the hot video of the past week was “The Chronic of Narnia Rap,” a comic music video takeoff on “The Chronicles of Narnia” from the December 17 Saturday Night Live show. Visits to YouTube, the video search site where it was shown, shot up 83% in one week (week ending 12/24/05 versus week ending 12/17/05) and surpassed visits to Google Video Search. According to the New York Times, “Lazy Sunday,” the video’s official title, has been downloaded 1.2 million times in slightly more than one week!

Examination of clickstream data for YouTube reveals the viral nature of videos: many of the top upstream sites that sent visits to YouTube last week were either community sites like MySpace or web email services:

Not surprisingly, given the nature of the video and the upstream traffic, visitors to YouTube are overwhelmingly young. For the 4 weeks ending 12/24/05, 45% of visitors to YouTube were in the 18-24 age group. Google Video Search and Yahoo! Video Search had fewer young visitors with 24% and 35%, respectively, in the 18-24 bracket. The younger set is quickly adopting new video technology, and television networks are smart to be posting shows on iTunes and streaming shows on Yahoo!.
Incidentally, if you run a search for “Chinese boys” on YouTube, you get 124 results, which include the other videos by the original duo, as well as dozens of parodies, including Mexican boys, Brazilian boys, Chinese girls, and Canadian boys. Compare this to the 17 results on Google Video. This demonstrates the power of tagging and the benefits of a folksonomy for searching for user-generated content.