Much like the situation in many schools the Pentagon decided to ban a variety of sites from the military including Metacafe, YouTube, iFilm, StupidVideos, FileCabi, Photobucket MySpace, BlackPlanet , MTV and more.

YouTube has now challenged the ban and is now working with the Pentagon to encourage them to remove the block.

YouTube’s CEO Chad Hurley said:

"They said it might be a bandwidth issue, but they created the Internet, so I don’t know what the problem is."

I just noticed that Google is integrating video thumbnails into its regular search results. It is doing this for video clips from select sites (pictured above).

Video sites that seem to get a thumbnail are:

• Yahoo Video
• MetaCafe
• YouTube
• Google Video
• MySpace
• Vimeo

MetaCafe will be taking a similar approach to advertising as YouTube by inserting static text-based adverts within video clips on its website.

MetaCafe has partnered with Adap.tv to provide these adverts. Adap.tv is a new online video advertising platform that has just launched publically. The company allows publishers and advertisers to match relevant advertising with online video content.

Adap.tv’s partnership with MetaCafe is very substantial given that MetaCafe is one of the leading video sharing sites and has an estimated 20 million visitors a month.

People often look at the number of visitors that a website receives, and how many pages that visitors look at on the site, to decide whether a website is popular or not. An easy way to do that is just too simply check the Alexa traffic rank of a website.

But just because a site is busy does not mean that people necessarily like it more than a site which is less busy. But how could you see how much people actually like a site?

Use Del.icio.us to compare popularity

Well you could check how many times people have bookmarked all the pages from a site (not just the homepage) in Del.icio.us. People will only tend to bookmark something if they find it interesting.

It is pretty much impossible to find out how many Del.icio.us bookmarks a website has. You would have to search for every single page of that website in Del.icio.us and add then together all the bookmarks. Can you imagine doing that for a site like YouTube?

When it comes to the top video sharing websites on the internet the following websites are freqently mentioned:

• YouTube
• Blip.tv
• VideoEgg
• MetaCafe
• Dailymotion
• Veoh
• Google Video
• Grouper
• Jumpcut
• Eyespot
• MSN SoapBox
• MySpace Video
• AOL Uncut Video

So I thought it would be worthwhile to take a quick look to see just how popular these video sharing sites really are, and how their popularity compares.

I’ve just done this quickly using Alexa rank, its not the most accurate, but its the best we’ve got really. Here are the results:

We know that internet video has really taken off but just take a look at the growth of some example video related sites. The growth of video sharing sites like YouTube and Metacafe are phenomenal.

Now we are also beginning to see the growth of video search engines that index video from a variety of sources. These video search engines are lagging behind the major video sharing sites, but will these search engines ever catch them up?

graph courtesy of alexa

YouTube.com

The leading website for sharing and watching online video clips. The company was recently sold for $1.77 billion to Google. It now ranks as the 4th busiest site on the internet and receives an estimated 20 million unique users per month, but it could be over 30 million by now. YouTube was officially launched in December 2005 and has seen huge growth since the middle of 2006.