Our two posts on the Top 10 Social Bookmarking Sites and Top 10 Video Sites generated a lot of interest and questions. I wanted to take a moment and answer some of the questions here, instead of via the comments section.

There were some questions around the sites that made the top ten social bookmarking list. I used Qunatcast for all traffic numbers, so that I was at least using the same traffic source across all sites. One thing that struck me when I was complying the data was how small the audience size of these social bookmarking sites is, especially when compared to the video sites. Blinklist.com for example has 353K U.S. monthly uniques while Blinklist.com reaches about 205K U.S. monthly uniques. These are not huge numbers. Somebody asked me why Sphinn.com was not on the list and Quantcast shows only 13k U.S. monthly uniques.

Some commented that StumbleUpon seems to be the social networking sites that supplies the most consistent traffic. With 1.5 million unique visitors a month from the U.S, StumbleUpon is only a fraction of the size of Digg or Propeller, but it seems be the most broad based audience. By broad based I mean that I have seen StumbleUpon generate significant amounts of traffic across many different markets, illustrating that it is used by a wide variety of people. James Duthie from Online Marketing Banner ccommented that “I’m wondering if at some point we will see a mass exodus from Digg to StumbleUpon or another network ala MySpace -> Facebook. To me, StumbleUpon offers superior services to Digg and I sense others feel the same way (especially those new to social media).”

That is a good question and it will be interesting to see how SU reacts to the influx of ex-Digg gamers. I noticed that week that when I when to add a comment to a site tnhta had already been stumbled that SU added a Coptcha to the page to catch bots! SU has a lot less spam than Digg, and if it can keep itself relatively spam free, SU has the opportunity to become the number one social bookmarking site within a year or so.

On the video post, Thomas M. Schmitz from Portent Interactive pointed out that I had missed www.Veoh.com. Veoh has a Quantcast rank is 184 which places them just between vids.myspace.com and video.google.com. They receive about 6million unique visitors a month in the U.S.

Another site that was mentioned was Vimeo.com. Vimeo is a top 10,000 site that reaches over 294K U.S. monthly uniques. Unlike the social bookmarking sites, 294k uniques does not make the top 10 list in video,

Gorso had some really interesting comments about Quantcast and measuring the size of the video market. He wrote:

interesting numbers there on quantcast, some of the sites have the ‘quantified publisher’ thing going on, which I guess adds some direct tracking logic on the sites who participate. Some of them are listed as parts of larger networks:
imeem.com is part of the imeem network (pseudo rank 13). imeem network is a huger destination that reaches over 113 million monthly uniques, of which 41 million (37%) are in the US
metacafe.com is a member of the metacafe network (pseudo rank 64).  Metacafe network is a top 100 destination that reaches over 34 million monthly uniques of which 12 million (34%) are in the US
I think what they’re tracking is the number of people who brows to pages with a video from imeem or metacafe in the page. So what this tells us is that media sites can have huge indirect audiences, and it also tells us that imeem’s total audience is bigger than any other site, except for youtube.

Interesting observation. If I asked you to list the largest video sites how many of you would have put imeem second? How many of you had heard of imeem before reading this post?
YouTube and networks like imeem are so large now that they are in essence the Internet’s version of TV channels. How long until these “video networks” start producing and publishing their own videos? Why cannot YouTube create say a comedy channel that debuts new videos on a Friday night?  They could sell ads, and easily monetize the traffic, adding a significant revenue stream to their existing business model.

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