heather posted some interesting research on the hitwise blog today about searches conducted for the terms ‘youtube’ and ‘funny videos’. while the research is limited to the uk it is general enough that it should by the same for the u.s. and most of western europe.

we found a strong negative correlation between the weekly share of UK Internet searches for “youtube” and “funny videos” over the past two years.

while we know from statistics 101 that correlation doesn’t imply causation, it seems that in this case that the decline in searches for the term ‘funny videos’ is caused by the rise in youtube’s popularity; just as youtube begins to take off, there is a sharp decline for searches for ‘funny videos’.

this is an expected result of a couple of obvious things:

1. people want to find not search: by searching for youtube, they know they can find funny videos, which would explain the negative correlation between the two.

2. people want content aggregation: youtube works because it is the hub for funny videos. rather than scouring the web and jumping from site to site, people can just come to youtube and jump from clip to clip. this is the same reason why sites like ebaum’s world succeeded.

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