I’ve written here before on how Flickr introduced videos in order to compete with the popular YouTube. Flickr’s owned by Yahoo, while Google owns YouTube.

Both services have a huge usership, however, I think the community behavior is different in each one. There are people who love to look at still photos, there are people who love to watch videos, and there are people who love to do both. There are people who browse both services for entertainment and to view material of interest to them. YouTube only contains video content, while Flickr allows both. But, there’s relatively few videos in Flickr – I rarely run across any when searching by keyword within the service. While one may search for video-only in Flickr, it requires using the Advanced search form, which fewer people are likely to do. So, I’d imagine that there’s relatively few people who even realize that videos are available in Flickr.

Comparatively, if you ask someone where to go to find popular video clips such as music videos, most will likely tell you “YouTube”.

What this boils down to: if one desires to promote via video, YouTube still remains tops. It’s presented well in Google Search results, and it has a lot of devoted users who are searching within the vertical for video content. Flickr is still tops for promotion through photos.

My experiment with the Texas Stadium Implosion video performed best in YouTube today, compared to Flickr (I embedded the Flickr version above). My YouTube Texas Stadium video got over 1,000 views and 100 comments in less than 24hrs, so far. I uploaded the Flickr vid much later, but the rate of views for it is much lower. When people want to view an explosion, they want video. And, when they want video, they think of YouTube, first.

I’ve periodically updated a chart of various photo sharing services which provide best image SEO value, and Flickr is still tops on that. I need to update that chart soon! For Video SEO, YouTube is still tops – so much so that I don’t think it even makes sense to do a comparison chart as I’ve done with images.