Is YouTube your best option?

Video statistics these days are quite staggering. According to Google Trends, more people online are searching for online videos than they are searching for shopping or news.

That’s an amazing thing, because just a couple years ago, most industry experts swore that “shopping” was the pinnacle of the web and nothing would ever surpass it in search volume.

The experts were wrong… by a LOT. This makes the following stats even more impressive: ComScore Video Metrix reports that over 10 billion videos were watched in December 2007, with about 75% of all Americans online watching at least one video.

What these numbers mean to you, as an internet marketer is this: If you’re not using video as a key part of your overall marketing campaign yet, you certainly should be. And pronto! Let’s take a more detailed look at some of the top video sharing sites you can use to market your products and services.

YouTube is, of course, the #1 video site and where much of the video-watching happens. Let’s take a brief look at YouTube’s audience. Their audience is 51% female and 49% male and the age range is young (18-24) and white (73%). Interestingly, 51% of YouTube visitors have a household income over $60K and 53% have attended college or graduate school.

YouTube is owned by Google and my testing shows that YouTube videos tend to rank well in Google (higher than videos from other sites). So, if you had to pick only one site for your videos, YouTube would be it.

But YouTube is not the only game in town. As an internet marketer you should take a very serious look at the other popular video sharing sites available. Let’s take a look at a few of these so you can see how they compare to YouTube. The audience for some of these sites might be a better match than YouTube for your particular niche.

Dailymotion gets 48 million unique visitors per month. Only 6 million of those unique visitors are from the US (compared to YouTube’s 62 million monthly US unique visitors). 60 percent of the audience is male and the average income is $30-60K. The video limit is 20 minutes (compared to YouTube’s 10 minutes). Even though it has a large user base it doesn’t get talked about much in the US. But as you can see, you can reach a large foreign market through Dailymotion and get more hits than you would just from YouTube alone.

Metacafe is the second largest video site in the US. Unlike YouTube, which has slightly more male viewers than female, Metacafe has a heavily male audience at 61%. It ranks second behind MySpace in number of comments per video. This reflects a very active and involved community – which is always a good thing for a social marketer.

Google Video attracts an even younger audience than YouTube. The audience is 53% male and mostly white (71%).

Video.MSN.com appeals to a slightly female audience (51%) and an older audience (52% are over the age of 45). It receives 2.7 million unique visitors each month.

I hope that the short list above gave you an idea of the variety in video sharing websites available for your marketing efforts. Fortunately, thanks to video uploading systems like TrafficGeyser, you can easily upload videos to many different video sharing sites at once to achieve the broadest reach possible.

Video is here. Video is now. Are you using it yet?