When it comes to online video sharing Youtube is the mother of all sites. It is undoubtedly the No. 1 web site for sharing video clips on the blogosphere. Youtube was the first entrant and kind of pioneered the idea and walked away with tremendous success. Like they say; the early bird catches the worm – Youtube has garnered massive subscribers. In 2006 it ranked as the 5th most popular website on Alexa, far outpacing even the growth of the popular social networking site MySpace. 100 million clips are viewed daily on YouTube, with an additional 65,000 new videos uploaded per 24 hours. Youtube has grown so quickly and so fast that the file up load to Youtube these days is not the fastest.

But many people do not realize that Youtube is not the only service that offers video sharing. There are a handful of them that offer a similar service. Some of these have additional advantages like advertising sharing and affiliate marketing features.

Googlevideo is popular but Google bought Youtube recently for $1.65 Billion. However both remain separate services.

Let’s look at some of the other options available and that can challenge Youtube’s dominance.

Revver
Revver was launched a year ago; the site is slowly gaining in popularity. A few months ago 20,000 videos were available and now more than 100,000 videos were available. Revver is one of the first video-sharing websites to monetize user-generated content through advertising. Revver’s system can be compared to Google’s Adwords, but for video rather than websites. There is a clickable advert at the end of each video. When viewers click on it, the advertiser is charged and the advertising fee is split between the video creator and Revver. The site’s most popular user, a creator of videos mixing Mentos into Coke, had generated around $30,000. The coke experiment has gotten 6 million views. They could monetize only because of Revver’s revenue sharing model. Users are further encouraged to share by Revver’s affiliate program. An Affiliate is a user who helps to promote their favorite videos (or any videos they believe will become popular), be it through email, peer-to-peer sharing, or posting on their own website or on social-networking webpages. Revver affiliates earn 20% of ad revenue for sharing videos.

Metacafe
A 3 year old web site Metacafe it offers over 450 million videos every month, to two million registered visitors and 120 million visitors monthly. The site experiences 19 million unique users each month. It has an Alexa ranking of around 128. Users can upload to the website’s severs and share their videos. Metacafe also offers a desktop application, mainly targeted at users who are “video addicts” and download many of the videos every week. A viewer can watch a video, rate it and send it to his friends by email or Messenger. All ratings are stored and the site shows statistics for videos by the Highest Rank, Most Viewed, Most Discussed, and Most Recent. Additionally, the site shows a list of top submitters and top producers.

It is superior to Youtube in a way since the content on the website is first reviewed by special reviewers, and only then posted to the site. That way, non-quality videos simply don’t get to the site. It is currently the 3rd largest video sharing site in the world. Metacafe also has a reward system. They pay you $5 for every thousand views your video gets on their site. Payment starts when your video reaches 20,000 views and has a rating of 3.00 or higher - which tells us that the viewers like the video. On top of that, the license to Metacafe is a non-exclusive deal - you retain ownership of your video. Metacafe helps build your brand by marketing your content and making you money. This has helped Metacafe maintain high quality videos.

Dailymotion
A Paris based service; as of November 2006, the site was getting about 9,000 new videos posted daily, and page views of 16 million per day. The maximum size of video per file is 150MB (compared to 100MB for Youtube.) The site does not have length restrictions for uploading unlike many other video sharing websites. However unlike Youtube; Dailymotion allows users to upload X-rated content. The site provides channels to allow users to upload to relevant subjects.

ifilm
ifilm is another online video sharing site video clips, short films, movie trailers, and other of interest. Like many commercial websites, they offer free basic service supported by ads. iFilm also hosts many Viral marketing videos, allowing these clips to spread between users easily. In 2005 it was purchased by MTV Networks in a multi-million dollar deal. It provides about 2 million views per day and the maximum size can be 100mb like most other video sites.

ourmedia
It is s a media archive, which freely hosts video or audio clips, images, text, and which do not violate copyright laws. The website was launched in 2005 and has 110,000 members. There is no limit for file upload size.

vMix
Started by engineers from MP3.com in 2005 vMix is a video sharing and online community dedicated to the creation and sharing of video clips and slideshows. Currently, vMix has 664,000 monthly unique users, and 3.5 million monthly page views according to Nielsen//NetRatings. As of mid 2006 vMix members have uploaded 10,000 videos and photos. The editors review all the videos that are uploaded to screen them for copyrighted material, extreme violence or pornography. VMIX also hosts pictures, slideshows and online contests. Videos of up to 200MB can be uploaded.

vimeo
A video-sharing site launched in November 2004. It supports video downloads, and allows user-commenting on each video page. Users must register to upload content. Registered users may also create a profile. The site claims to have 109,000 users.

GoFish
It’s a California video sharing website that allows visitors to watch and upload video clips, similar to websites like YouTube and Google Video. GoFish is an early entrant into the user-generated video sector and the first publicly traded company in the space, provides people with an online platform for uploading, sharing, searching for and watching videos from around the world.

From the above you will agree that Youtube and Googlevideo are not the only options!

Inputs from Wikipedia and other sources

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