I’ve tried to rank video sharing sites in order of importance based on a combination of site’s homepage PageRank and Alexa Rank during the week of November 4, 2007. I am quite aware of the weaknesses of Alexa ranking and Google PageRank, but it’s still helpful guidelines to the relative importance of a site — and they’re free.

Most of these sites share videos only. Others share all kinds of photos and media as well as being social networking centers, so it’s hard to compare apples with apples. Still others, such as Brightcove, are moving away from free towards a service model for businesses to host and publish their videos.

I’ve marked the sites that can be tracked and uploaded to using TubeMogul, a convenient (and currently free) service for those who wish to distribute their videos to multiple sites. Some organizations will probably want to avoid some of the hippest sites listed below — though others may provide just the target audience they’re trying to reach with their videos. Don’t try to submit your video to all these sites — pick the few that suit your target demographic well. You soon reach the point of diminishing returns, since those at the bottom of the list have just a tiny fraction of the traffic of those at the top. They only reason I’ve included them is because some represent important niches that some businesses will want to reach, such as GodTube for the Christian market.

It’s pretty clear that hosting videos is fairly expensive since the file sizes are so large. Since finding ways to monetize a video sharing site are still in flux, I expect that many of the sites below will be out of business within the year — so if some of the links don’t work, that’s why.

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