What VodPod Knows about Embedded Video

If you want good market data, you’ve got to find someone who sees everything. Easier said than done. But when it comes to embeddable web video, Vodpod‘s records are likely the best cross-section you can get. Vodpod is a tool for collecting videos from around the web that isn’t (yet) hugely popular, but it does have a great international cross-section of video lovers. The site relaunched with a simplified interface over the weekend, about the same time it crossed the milestone of a million videos collected by its members.

To collect a video to put in your Vodpod site profile or in a widget on your web page (if you’re reading this on NewTeeVee.com, look up to the top of our page for an example), whoever hosts the video needs to enable other web pages to grab “embed code” to display the video without making their own copy of it. The hardworking engineers at Remixation (Vodpod’s parent company) have put in the work to figure out how to extract a uniform-sized and well-behaved player and any video’s relevant metadata from thousands of video sites.

In commemoration of its million-video milestone, Vodpod CEO Mark Hall checked in on his stats and shared some details about the 3,500 separate sites his members have grabbed embedded video from.

Some key takeaways:

– Half of videos collected on Vodpod come from YouTube (consistent since Vodpod started a little over a year ago)
– The next five biggest sites — Dailymotion, MySpace, Google, blip.tv, and Brightcove — account for about 25 percent of videos collected
– Sites in sixth through five-hundredth place account for about 23 percent of videos collected
– Sites 501 through 3,500 account for about 2 percent of videos collected

Hall also listed for us the many “YouTube-like” sites from around the world feature in Vodpod’s top 100:

alice.it (Italy)
tu.tv (Spanish language, U.S. & Latin America)
sapo.pt (Portugal)
sevenload.com (Germany)
d1g.com (Middle East)
bursavideo (Indonesia)
tudou.com (China)
youku.com (China)
garagetv.be (Belgium)
uol.com.br (Brazil)
vpod.tv (France)
56.com (China)

Lastly, Hall mentioned three sites that have appeared for the first time on Vodpod in the last month: Flickr, BBC.co.uk, and RedLasso.

Thirty-five hundred sites who enable their video to be embedded is a pretty significant number — it’s skyrocketed from next to nothing in the pre-YouTube days. (Though the rise of embeddable video comes with interesting implications; see our pieces on the death of exclusivity and the frustrating gaps left when hosts take their videos down.) Despite notable additions to the embed-friendly cohort such as MSNBC, MTV Networks, and Hulu, this group still lacks most of the television content you can watch online.

In my opinion, breaking into “The Vodpod 100″ or something like it should be a goal for video sites. Cause after all, if people are collecting and embedding your video — spreading it across the web and explicitly recommending it — they really care.

Disclosure: The NewTeeVee staff uses Vodpod and we also share an investor, True Ventures. But regardless of the relationship, we just love us some data analysis.

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post