YouTube continues to be the king of online, according to a new report from comScore. The study of video watching habits in March says Google's video properties generated nearly 17 percent of the 7 billion videos watched online. Beyond Google the market gets quickly fractured as only four of the biggest video sites garnered more than 5 percent of market share.

This proves video is still wide open and that newcomers (hello Joost!) have ample opportunity to become market leaders. Remember also that just as Google isn't a content owner in the search business, their videos are all owned by other people, so if YouTube irritates the upload crowd, the market could shift swiftly. While searching the internet is always free, Google's ability to stream and index video is tentative.

The people who watched videos online (70 percent of all online users) averaged more than two hours of video watching during the month, so there's still a long ways to go in catching TV and movies in importance. As much as I'm a believer in being able to choose your online viewing, I doubt the medium will ever be the primary video experience.

Of all those hours of video watching, I'm guessing that there were only a few minutes per person of advertisements. Once video advertising can generate the per viewer/per hour rates of TV, we're looking at a multi-billion dollar opportunity.

Auction site eBay has pulled out of Google AdWords as the frienemies are close to no longer being on speaking terms.

The refusal of one multi-service organization to do business with another proves the upside of mega companies such as Google, Microsoft, etc. If Google offers everything from ads to search to video, then their competitors will have little choice but to team up with other companies (or buy their own), such as eBay needing a viable search marketing partner.

Strong competition is healthy for the industry, and only by competitors growing in size can they keep each other in check. Independent companies can continue to work with the "best of breed" parts of these organizations.

Advertisers are still paying premiums to put their message on TV even though audiences are spending a greater proportion of their time online. Why? Because old habits die hard and ad networks have yet to take advantage of online tracking and rich media technologies.

According to Jupiter Research (per MediaPost), despite more time at the keyboard, there has not been much cannibalization of TV ads; instead print ads are losing share. Still, newspapers are getting a disproportionate share of ad dollars.

Even though TV ads are only tracked on broad demographic data, they are better at entertaining and informing than display ads or interactive ads. Annoying TV commercials are much more memorable than the best of today's online ads.

But the biggest opportunity is in better behavioral and targeted marketing technologies.
According to eMarketer behavioral ads will nearly double to $1 billion per year starting in 2008, and it can't happen soon enough. For online marketers the race is on to learn more about consumers than their cable TV/set-top counterparts. Should the tracking capabilities of TiVo etc. become widespread before target marketing does, it will be even more challenging to convince agencies and big advertisers to move money away from TV.

Technorati has expanded its mission to become the authority on tagging of all types of content. The former blog search tool now indexes videos and music along with blogs and news, allowing a personalized window into what's hot.

The new utility provides more data about the hottest tags and detail about the buzz about websites, news, and tags, and the company offers several widget tools for tracking links to websites that compliments the raw traffic data that you can get from Google Analytics. You can see who's linking, where you rank and what are the most popular tags associated with your blog.

Technorati's tags are becoming so popular with users that they are gaining in rank with Google's natural results, according to Google Blogoscope. Being able to optimize your tags and track your performance with Technorati and del.icio.us is becoming just as important in growing and understanding traffic as your SEO efforts.

Will search engines ever get on the ball and incorporate tagging as part of their search options and in their algorithms? Google et al should be paying attention, especially in searching rich media where text searching doesn't do the job.

Apple is reportedly in talks with the movie studios to develop an online movie rental service that would enable videos to be accessible for up to one month for $2.99. If the Financial Times report is accurate, companies from Movielink to Blockbuster to Netflix to Comcast should be nervous.

Until now AppleTV has been hamstrung by limited video selection (including no rentals) and because it offers nothing aside from the user interface to distinguish it from other available technologies. The closest director competitor has been the TiVo-Amazon Unbox service, which has yet to impact the video rental business in a meaningful way.

But by making it seamless to rent movies that can also be watched on mobile devices from the sofa and at a price that beats some services, Apple could quickly reverse AppleTV's fortunes. Netflix' and Blockbuster's subscription services would still be cheaper, but waiting for DVDs by mail lacks the immediacy and convenience of using the remote control to purchase.

The rumor of this service should force Comcast and the other cable providers to consider lowering the prices of their video on demand services. The market for $5 movie rentals could dwindle quickly, and the listing Movielink service could permanently go under if Apple delivers.

Movie rentals are a commodity that can now be delivered via DVD, set-top, game console, PC, and soon Apple TV. Will Apple TV sell as much as the iPod? Not a chance. But a legitimate contender from Apple will force all of the other services to be more competitive on pricing, which is good news for consumers. I've been hard on Apple since the beginning of AppleTV, but this service could silence the critics.