Today we issued a press release on the growing popularity of online video sites and the dominance of YouTube in that category. The chart in the release showed the trend in market share of visits for YouTube, MySpace Video, Yahoo! Video Search and Google Video. The late March/early April spike in visits to MySpace Video sent its market share above YouTube for three weeks before dropping back down. Despite low average session times, the massive increase in visits to MySpace Video demonstrates the distribution power of MySpace.
Another metric that can be used to gauge visitor engagement with a site is market share of page views. The chart below shows market share of page views for the same sites as in the press release, but it tells a very different story. YouTube is serving more than three times as many pages as MySpace Video for the week ending May 20, 2006, and the MySpace Video wide launch on March 31 didn’t bring its share of page views very close to YouTube’s. And Yahoo! Video is number 2, consistently serving more pages than MySpace video except during that one week.

The table below shows the 10 sites in the video search custom category by visits and page views side by side, so you can se the differences. YouTube accounts for 54% of page views, compared to only 43% of visits, while MySpace Videos accounts for only 15% of page views and 24% of visits, which again speaks to the high level of engagement of YouTube’s users, versus the low engagement, and thus low session times, for MySpace Videos.
Sometimes looking at market share of visits to competitive websites does not tell the whole story – it can be revealing to look at share of page views as well as session times to get a clearer picture of what is happening on a site.