YouTube Eats up "Funny Videos" Searches
While there is very little visibility into the searches performed on YouTube, Hitwise noticed some things can be inferred about its traffic. For example, they found that searches for “Funny Videos” dropped steadily as searches for “YouTube” grew.
As in, people figured out that funny videos always ended up on You Tube, and thus, there was little purpose in searching on Google for them.
I think this is one of the first real pieces of evidence that shows how YouTube was a good buy for Google. If You Tube was owned by Yahoo, that would be a lot of searches that got gobbled up by a competitor’s site. YouTube is becoming an actual video search engine, at times completely bypassing Google. In short, Google saw an emerging search market on YouTube — now that is some good foresight.
