SNL Chronicles of Narnia Rap causes YouTube to Overtake Google Video Search
Video Search has continued to take off since my post on the Chinese Students Singing Backstreet Boys. Visits to Google Video search have increased by 48% for the week ending 12/24/05 compared to the week of that post …
Context & Ripple Effects
Video search has been building all month: Hitwise had already flagged rising traffic after its post on the Chinese Students Singing Backstreet Boys clip, and the category kept accelerating into late December. The new week-ending-12/24/05 numbers show Google Video search visits up 48% over that earlier period — yet still not enough to hold the lead.
What changed is where viewers went: per Hitwise, YouTube overtook Google Video in search visits for the week, with the SNL Chronicles of Narnia rap as the driver. Both properties were growing fast; the point of the data is that a single NBC sketch clip pushed one destination past a Google property even while that property grew nearly half again in a week.
First-order effects
- YouTube ends the week ending 12/24/05 ahead of Google Video in US search visits, per Hitwise, with an NBC-produced SNL rap serving as the traffic engine on a platform NBC neither owns nor monetizes directly.
- Google Video's own 48% weekly visit growth shows the whole video-search category surging — the crossover reflects YouTube growing faster, not Google Video stalling.
Second-order effects
- Google faces a positioning problem its search pedigree doesn't solve: viewers are navigating to a hosted, community-driven destination rather than searching an index of clips, putting pressure on how Google Video packages free playback versus paid downloads.
- Broadcasters get a live demonstration that a network clip's audience value accrues to whichever site hosts it — raising the stakes for rights, takedown, and revenue-sharing decisions around SNL content appearing on third-party services.
Third-order effects
- If viral broadcast clips keep routing audiences this way, video discovery structurally shifts from search-engine indexing toward destination sites that host and socialize the content themselves — a reordering of who captures the audience between query and playback.
- Traffic-measurement firms like Hitwise become the public scorekeepers for these category crossovers, giving single viral moments the power to reset perceived market leadership in web services.
The trend: Viral broadcast clips are pulling video audiences from search-indexed clip libraries toward host-and-share destinations like YouTube, with each Hitwise crossover marking the migration's pace.