Video search on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S., according to the latest search engine numbers from comScore. Its monthly qSearch report, which was released on Thursday night, breaks out the number of searches conducted on YouTube. If it were a standalone site, YouTube would be the second largest search engine after Google. More searches are done through YouTube than through Yahoo, which has been the case for the past few months.

Christa Quarles, an analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners, writes in a report:

YouTube continues to be a standout contributor for Google generating 2.73bn searches in the U.S., up 8.5% from 2.52bn last month and up 114% from 1.28bn in November 2007. YouTube currently represents 25.4% of U.S. Google site searches compared with 17.4% in November 2007 and is larger than all of Yahoo based on total U.S. queries in November.

The comScore numbers show healthy growth in core search activity as well (stripping out video search, map search, etc), especially for Google. Plain-vanilla search for Google grew 32.3 percent annually, compared to a 29.6 percent growth rate in October. Perhaps all of that holiday bargain hunting is helping.

Google’s core search market share (which does not include YouTube) edged up 0.4 percent from October to 63.5 percent (and up 5.9 percent year-over-year).

Yahoo’s market share of core search queries was 20.4 percent (down 0.1 percent from October, and down 2 percent year-over-year) and Microsoft’s was 8.3 percent (down 0.2 percent month-over-month, and down 1.5 percent year-over-year). See the tables below.

Posted by Caroline McCarthy

From a MySpace-related suicide to hate speech on YouTube, the world of user-generated content has been plagued by plain, old nastiness since its early days.

That’s why, as part of the Family Online Safety Institute conference in Washington, D.C., YouTube parent company Google has unveiled an “Abuse and Safety” resource guide.

According to a post on the official Google blog, the new section of YouTube’s help center features “straightforward safety tips and multimedia resources from experts and prominent safety organizations” regarding topics like cyberbulling, privacy, spam, and sexual exploitation.

YouTube also said that the resource guide will make it more straightforward to find out how to manage privacy and safety settings.

The dark underbelly of online video was in the spotlight once again when a Florida teenager used live-streaming service Justin.tv to broadcast his suicide last month.

Video infrastructure site Delve Networks launched TroopTube in partnership with the Department of Defense a few days ago as a more secure alternative to YouTube, which the DoD banned in 2007. TroopTube is basically Youtube, but without the embedding feature, and the DoD has moderation and censorship controls.

Now Delve Networks CEO says Google is up to no good, trying to convince the DoD that TroopTube won’t scale, and that YouTube’s exclusive arrangement with Barack Obama means the troops won’t be able to watch the president’s weekly talks. “Google is trying to attack TroopTube,” he says.

The email is below, and we’re following up with Google for a comment.

I should not be telling you this and will get in big trouble with the DoD, but it is just too interesting to not mention.

Today, I was informed that Google is trying to attack TroopTube by telling all sorts of technical lies about Delve’s ability to scale. Apparently, they don’t really understand the cloud computing thing.

They also claim that because Barrack Obama is posting his presidential messages on YouTube and not TroopTube that the troops wont be able to get video from the president and that is another reason for the DoD to cancel the TroopTube project.

So much for do no evil. I guess Google would rather have troops be unable to get videos from their loved ones this Thanksgiving.

Why do certain videos on YouTube become mass phenomena while the vast majority of videos just get a handful of views, if any?

Riley Crane, an American post doctoral fellow currently researching at the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks at ETH university in Zurich/Switzerland, says he has the answer: According to him, the success of online videos can be explained with physics.

Crane claims every time a YouTube video turns into a hit, the development takes the form of an “attention spiral”, a geometric pattern that partly follows physical laws. He discovered that a decrease of popularity with certain videos, for example, can be explained through methods usually utilized in modeling the aftershocks of earthquakes. He believes social systems on the web follow the rules of physics and can therefore be analyzed mathematically.

The popularity of YouTube videos can be characterized through curves visualizing increases and decreases in the number of viewers and the amount of attention they pay to each video. For example, the following graph shows two different attention spirals (top left: level of search activity following the Tsunami that hit part of Asia in December 2004; top right: the volume of search queries for Harry Potter between April and October 2007, bottom left:views of Harry Potter videos on YouTube; bottom right: views of tsunami videos on Youtube):

After researching the usage of about 5 million YouTube videos over 8 months, Crane found out that only 10 percent are viewed more than 100 times a day. According to Crane, the popularity of these videos can be measured through distinguishing whether a burst of activity was observed after a large-scale “exogenous” (external) shock or whether it’s the result of a number of smaller “endogeneous” (internal) factors that had a cumulative effect. Also, it seems to be important to take into account the extent to which web users can influence others to take action (what he calls “critical” vs. “subcritical,” where the latter term means exerting influence is impossible).

Crane categorizes especially popular videos into three different classes:

• “junk” (exogenous subcritical type, videos that quickly pick up and lose viewers / see the green diagram at the bottom left in the picture below)
• “viral” (endogenous critical type, videos spreading through the site through word of mouth / see the red diagram at the top right in the picture below)
• “quality” (exogenous critical type, videos that attract attention quickly and only slowly lose their appeal over time because of their high quality / see the blue diagram at the bottom right in the picture below)

Junk videos are characterized by a significant peak that contains the vast majority of views and fail to spread through the site. In contrast to quality videos, viral videos show precursory growth before peaking out and decaying slowly (see the Harry Potter example above, diagram A): It takes time for the endogenous phenomenon to build up and spread within the network. Quality videos, however, reach the peak much faster as a reaction to an external “shock” but also decay slowly (see the Tsunami video example above, diagram B).

Crane claims that viral and quality videos show very characteristic patterns over a specific period of time, supposedly making it possible (through the analysis of tendencies) to predict if a video has the potential to become a super hit.

The final goal is the development of an encompassing and science-based online trend monitoring system. The university newsletter writes (German only) Amazon is currently in negotiations with Crane to integrate his model into its site, hoping to predict the potential of newly listed products at an early stage.

The critical factor here (and one of the long-term objectives) is to correctly determine the tipping point, the point in time at which the viral effect kicks in and sales or (in the case of YouTube) views of videos take off. Details of the Crane model (presented with fellow researcher Didier Sornette) can be found in the October issue of PNAS magazine (available online here).

A topic I’ve tackled several times here at Mashable has been the question of Hulu versus YouTube in terms of their advertising strategies. My friend Frederic Lardinois over at ReadWriteWeb brought the topic up today in reference to news from the Financial Times regarding the revenue of the two video business units.

In the past, though, tons of bloggers have taken potshots at YouTube for not realizing the potential of the $1.65 billion investment by Google. One of the more recent times I got on this particular merry-go-round was back in June in response to Mark Cuban, who said that Hulu was in danger of roundly kicking YouTube’s ass in terms of viewership and monetization. Back then, as they do now, the traffic numbers simply tell a different story.

As you can see, back in June through October of this month, Hulu has seen significant gains relative to their current traffic patterns (very likely due to the highly watched election videos and Sarah Palin – watch for this line to drop in December). Compared to YouTube? The difference is still monstrous.

How is it possible, then, that the Financial Times is able to make statements like this:

Neither company breaks out its advertising revenues but Arash Amel, analyst at Screen Digest, forecasts that in 2008 YouTube will generate about $100m in the US, compared with about $70m at Hulu. Next year both sites will generate about $180m in the US, he says. YouTube currently earns around half of its revenues in the US, while Hulu has not yet launched internationally.

Setting aside any quibbles we may have with their estimates, for a moment, very simply put – the Hulu sales team is lightyears ahead of what’s being done at Google.

Aren’t Advertisers Just Scared of YouTube?

That’s the phrase that pays when pundits and analysts come together to talk about monetization efforts on UGC video. Frederic mentioned it in his writeup. Henry Blodgett said something similar when he deigned to advise Google to “throw in the towel” on YouTube. The issue doesn’t have anything to do with advertiser readiness to throw down with the money, and more to do with the limited avenues to do so.

Just as a proof-of-concept on this theory, give yourself a five minute limit to figure out how to put an ad on the side-bar on a Google search result.  Even if you don’t know where to start, you should get there with four minutes to spare, assuming you know how to … you know … type a Google query.

Now try the same thing with YouTube.

Not so easy, is it?  If you’re lucky, on your third or fourth search query, you’ll turn up this page, which YouTube dubs its online media kit. If you have the patience, you can spend about a half-hour watching Googlers tell you how awesome it is to advertise on YouTube, complete with some product manager playing with his plastic dinosaurs.

This is what I’m talking about.  If you actually watch these videos, you get the picture that YouTube is running advertisements on only a fraction of those gazillions of page-views and video views. In fact, they only run ads on videos that participate in the “Partner Program,” a program not easy to figure out how to join, either.

Just think of the money YouTube could make if they ran just a stupid little text-based AdSense unit on every page on YouTube. We started running through this intellectual exercise the last time this topic came up here – we determined that YouTube needed to monetize (generously) 1% of their traffic to thoroughly trounce Hulu.

It’s easy to see here that the same minds that brought us search ads aren’t working on what’s at YouTube, otherwise they’d have this problem licked by now. For further proof, take a gander at your AdWords account, and try to find the button that allows you to advertise on YouTube.  I’ll save you some time – it isn’t there, not even next to the “advertise on radio” or “advertise on TV” links.

Hulu Doesn’t Have an Easy Advertiser Form Either. How Are They Doing So Well?

That’s because they don’t need one. As Blodget notes in his write-up, Hulu gives more money back to its partners than YouTube does with theirs.  What Blodget fails to mention is that this is a pointless statistic, since Hulu is essentially a puppet entity for News Corporation and NBC Universal.

This means that they don’t really need to rely on an in-house sales team as YouTube does, at least not throughout the year. They do the bulk of their big name, high dollar selling at what’s called the “upfronts” every year. Millions of dollars trade hands after the May sweeps at these star-studded events, and YouTube hasn’t made inroads to tap into this market.

If they sold at the upfronts, it isn’t like it would land them the type of money Hulu’s getting.  Even the most watched content on YouTube still doesn’t have the international brand recognition of your average show on the WB. Simply put, the TV networks still have decades of brand recognition built up, and YouTube is technically still a toddler.

As Soon as Google and YouTube Start Playing to Their Strengths…

Here’s the point I’m driving at – YouTube has been doing things right in almost every category so far when it comes to growing the brand and traffic to the site.

They have a lumbering behemoth in terms of traffic, and it looks to me like they’re trying to outlast some dinosaurs of Old Media just long enough so that some of these pesky copyright issues outmode themselves (either by these Old Media companies dying off themselves, or their grasp of New Media catching up with reality). That’s frankly the only explanation I can think of behind why they’d not treat their YouTube traffic like every other type of traffic contained within the Google family.

Playing to their weaknesses, and by that I mean trying to compete with Hulu and other studio produced aggregators head on… it’s akin to looking for the golden needles in the haystack, instead of feeding all that hay into the gold-spinning wheel they have sitting in the back.

Some signs of how President-elect Barack Obama will use his massive Internet following are starting to surface. The President’s weekly radio address, a staple of American politics since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, will be posted to YouTube, starting this week with the Democratic address (the party not in power has also traditionally broadcast a weekly radio soundbite). The videos will also be posted to Change.gov, the President-elect’s transition site that launched last week.

According to The Washington Post, the Obama administration is also likely to launch a YouTube Channel for The White House after taking power. As a candidate, Obama (and rival John McCain) made heavy use of YouTube, utilizing the service for broadcasting speeches, campaign rallies, and political commercials. While placing the weekly radio addresses online in video will be a first, the current administration offers a full archive of all of President Bush’s weekly radio addresses as sound files at WhiteHouse.gov.

While this is certainly another sign that the Obama administration will continue to make social media and transparency an important piece of his Presidency, critics are quick to point out that he still has not updated his Twitter account since November 5th after winning the election. Presumably, we’ll continue to see new tools come out piecemeal as the transition team decides how to best utilize the Web.

Filed at 9:05 a.m. ET

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – YouTube will venture into webcasting later this month, in an effort to take the video sharing Web site’s popularity to a new level by showcasing the talent behind its most viewed videos.

The site, owned by search giant Google Inc., has matured from Web start-up and video fad to a site with loyal fans. But as any good TV industry executive will say, it needs to begin producing new and fresh content to keep its audience.

So, on November 22 in San Francisco, it is launching “YouTube Live,” a show featuring well-known stars such as rapper Will.i.Am and singer Katy Perry and YouTube sensations like 20-year-old Esmee Denters, who posted video of herself covering popular songs and became a star on the World Wide Web.

YouTube executives said the show will feature performers who are popular with the site’s users, a community that has already held unofficial events and whom the company wants to reach by streaming a live show for the first time.

“The value of YouTube is we’ve created this platform that’s been driven by the community, so this is in reaction to that,” said YouTube spokesman Chris Di Cesare “Having a community event that the community values benefits all involved.”

Since its inception in 2005, YouTube has been a repository for all kinds of Internet videos, from snippets of TV shows to off-beat demonstrations of skills such as cup-stacking to serious campaign ads in the recent U.S. presidential election.

But as other sites have found, Web surfers can be a fickle bunch of fans and keeping them on your site — which is what advertisers pay for — is a daunting task.

LIVE ON THE WEB

Taking their cues from the TV industry, Internet giants AOL, MySpace and Yahoo! have webcast original programing in recent years. What seems to work best, so far, has been live concerts by the likes of Madonna and The Pretenders.

Yahoo! Music landed car company Nissan as a sponsor of its tape-delayed concert series, called Nissan Live Sets, with the average concert receiving 2 million streams, the company said. The concerts are also broadcast on MTV cable channel Palladia.

For its part, YouTube said videos posted by the roughly 50 entertainers and other talents on the bill for “YouTube Live” have been viewed online more than 2.5 billion times, which the company said accounts for a big part of the site’s hits.

“These are the personalities that people at home have tuned in to watch,” Di Cesare said.

Those personalities include Discovery television show “Mythbusters,” Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, who will attend the “YouTube Live” event.

They will demonstrate a feat that has become a sensation on YouTube, the workings of a giant robot they designed to shoot paint at a canvas and create a version of the Mona Lisa, by Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci.

Singer Katy Perry, whose hit song “I Kissed a Girl” became an international chart-topper over the summer, will open the show. Perry, whose label is Capitol Music Group, posts videos at her own “channel” on YouTube.

Denters, the Dutch singer, is a budding star who rose to fame on the video Web site. More than 111 million times users have clicked on videos of her singing into a webcam, a homemade success story that eventually had pop star Justin Timberlake signing Denters to his Tennman Records label.

“It’s been a crazy story, and I have all that to thank from YouTube,” she said.

YouTube said it intends to hold follow-up events to “YouTube Live,” but it gave no details on those plans.

(Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)

I’ve said it twice before already, but I’ll reiterate: This is the YouTube election. Yes, Twitter has played some part. Reputable bloggers on all sides of the fence, too. But YouTube has been the glue that’s bound this big beautiful mess of a social media space together.

The class of political watchdogs that inhabit the space have given the presidential candidates, as well as the mainstream media, a real qualitative sense of what viral video is all about.  That goes as much for the ups as it does the downs. It’s all part of the puzzle, and plenty of us can delight in the fact that the people have influenced things more than they ever have before, either through sheer vigilance or vocal responsiveness to events on the campaign trail. Still, it’s not over. There’s November 4 to consider – and the many minutes of citizen journalism that will presumably be recorded that day.

Indeed, if there’s anything that can bring more noisemakers to the fore in the land where user-generated content remains supreme – quantitatively, at least – it is the method of granting a single day of voting in order to elect a new leader of a nation of 300,000,000-plus people. (Not counting the many preceding days for so-called absentee ballots that one-quarter to one-third of the voting public has chosen to deliver to Uncle Sam, of course.)

It’s bound to get ugly. Somewhat, anyway. From touchscreen mishaps to entirely dysfunctional or broken machines to challenges over valid and invalid registrations, the battle for a majority result one way or another is never clean-cut and never above-board 100% of the way through.

In light of this expectation, the reality of the ever-present “citizencam” makes for one such national situation that gives the public at large a teensy bit more powerful a role than it had on its person for elections past. Okay, not a teensy bit. A major leg up, you might say.

I’ll certainly leave it up to others to determine the who-what-when-where-and-how of the events which are to occur on Election Day, but suffice it to say that them handicams Mr. and Ms. America will inevitably have on their possession outside the voting booth and station will go far in exposing that which may not have received just attention 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, or 20 years ago.

Now, putting aside the political leanings of the man for a moment, the actor and and director Tim Robbins made it a point to mention on a recent edition of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” to urge citizens to keep the cameras rolling, as it were, throughout the day, as often as possible. Good advice, for sure, but whether that advice reached the right ears that evening last month is hardly of much pertinence here, of course, since it is undoubtedly going to happen anyway. I dare say people would have a harder time doing their due diligence in gathering the appropriate identification than they would their digital recorders.

So the only thing left to question is: Will you be ready on Election Day?

Imagery provided by iStockPhoto/3dbrained