YouTube Down the Chute Lane for the Second Straight Week

YouTube, the video sharing service offered by Google, has seen some surprising numbers in its past two-week traffic performance. Nielsen Online monitored it and saw that the world's biggest video site dropped down by about one million unique users, from 30.7 million to 29.7 million. The week it was measured for ended on January 13th.

This looks to be a trend for the search engine backed video sites, as Yahoo! also saw a drop in its numbers, from 2.2 million to 1.4. Note the difference in traffic, if you may. The decrease that the Sunnyvale-based company encountered was a lot more difficult to swallow, financially speaking, than YouTube's, as it almost cut its traffic in half. ½ unique visitors, ½ the ads being served, ½ the revenue. Dead simple.

The interesting thing is that the other big competitor in the game, MSN Video, did not attract all of the users lost by the other two, more like half of them fled to Microsoft Corp's service: it recorded a growth of 3.3 million, up from 2.5 the week before. The others either went to some similar smaller services or (and now comes the easiest solution) the free time people had taken after the holidays just finished, hence the loss in traffic.

It is said that week-to-week fluctuations are not uncommon in online video, but something tells me that this was too big a drop to be just random. Could people be having problems with the new monetization method that YouTube is trying to implement? Whatever the reason was, if the numbers don't pick themselves up in the rankings to be released next week, there'll probably be some serious brainstorming in a "stroke your beard" type of meeting over at the Mountain View-based company to find the reason and the solution.