A lot of this reminds me of the early days of the web, when there were a lot of competing search engines and portals with their own unique audiences. Now there is basically three (google, yahoo and msn) that account for nearly all the search engine traffic. The little guys are still around, but have dropped out of popularity or are just "front" sites that are really powered by one or all of the top three (meta search engines for example). I think the same thing will happen with video, but not for awhile. I would guess Google Video would become dominant in this field, since they have such large resources and already have the large majority of search engine traffic. Who will the other websites be? I have no idea, like I said Boy Who Never slept is receiving a lot of different traffic from each of video distribution websites, and Google Video currently is not providing any amazing numbers.
There will always be some space for niche or community run networks, for example Myspace already has such a rich social network established that they too will probably stay dominant in video distribution to the young market. I just uploaded my video clips there, I know you're probably saying why didn't you go there first, I did, but there was an error, my video just stayed in processing. Today I deleted it and reuploaded and now my videos are live. Strange huh?
Below is a list of some of the places I have uploaded the Boy Who Never Slept trailer and interview for online distribution. If you browse through them you'll see quit a variance in the amount of page views and downloads (not all the sites publicly display these). There is something you should note, in the beginning I wasn't sure of the specific title and description that would get the most views, so I tried a large amount, in addition it took a lot of time to upload the video to all of these different sites, so there is also up to a week delay in the release of the videos, so don't take these numbers at "face value" and be sure to look at how long the video has been live.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2331947814812474183
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7640843838848886272
http://www.addictingclips.com/Clip.aspx?key=CCA802CA0ECB0E89
http://www.addictingclips.com/Clip.aspx?key=BC5DC5234368E3D1
http://www.blip.tv/file/30738
http://blip.tv/file/30755
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2724224
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2724224
http://www.dailymotion.com/solomonrothman/video/155281
http://www.dailymotion.com/solomonrothman/video/155444
http://www.bolt.com/solomonrothman/video/887036
http://www.bolt.com/solomonrothman/video/888305
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=722305635&n=2
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=720537217&n=2
http://www.vimeo.com/clip:70433
http://www.vimeo.com/clip:70448
http://www.zshare.net/download/boywhoneverslepttrailer_256kb-mp4.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0rcOgxaM6E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tDYPwGwrfs
http://www.archive.org/details/Boy_Who_Never_Slept_Movie_Trailer
http://www.ourmedia.org/user/96428
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/219629
In addition to these I JUST uploaded the videos to grouper, and a few others. I'll be posting those links when they become available. If you know about any other major video distribution websites, please comment on this entry and post them. That would be excellent.
In future articles, I'll post a title and specific description of each of these video sites, along with my successes and failures with each one. This is really an exciting time for this, it's red hot. 3 years ago, it was a lot more difficult to distribute these videos, because hosting was more expensive and the popularity of pay-per-click website revenue models wasn't as developed.
And the Winner for Traffic Is?
It's still too early to tell, because the video hasn't been online long enough. It appears to be growing the fastest on addictingclips.com, but we shall see when more data becomes available.