SpectatorBytes

Years ago, I realized that Google’s search product has become the leading distribution platform for content on the Web. As a website owner or content publisher, one has to optimize its site structure to make sure that Google properly showcase your content when your users are looking for it. If Google does not want to showcase you, your site pretty much would not exist for most users. In other words, Google is like Wal-Mart for consumer goods producers. If you don’t get stock in Wal-Mart’s shelves, your chances of having a business at scale are much smaller.

Well, it now seems that Google is on its way to gain the same level of control over video content. TubeMogul has released a study about video distribution platforms.  They looked at 200K videos to determine which video platforms generated the most views for those videos. YouTube’s lead is staggering – with 4X the number of views than the nearest competitor (See Here).

YouTube is a platform just like search is. So, Google is likely to start creating features that will require video producers to start customizing the way they distribute their content specifically for YouTube (for example, how to best get categorized in YouTube channels). Once this starts to happen, other platforms will have to follow suit or fall behind. This will make sure the video ecosystem of online video on the Web is built with YouTube as the main platform. This is no different than search where most publishers optimize for Google’s sitemaps and do much less around Yahoo search, MSFT’s Live and Ask.com.

YouTube positions Google well to win the video monetization battle for performance-based advertising – which is ultimately the reason why Google paid $1.6B for this asset. This may have been obvious for a while but now there is data to back it up.