Korean Americans represent less than 1% of the US population. Still, SK Telecom thinks that segment is valuable enough that it markets a Helio sub-brand called “Helio Powered by SK Telecom” that offers Korean-language phones and content — and Korean-language advertising.

Because we’re thinking about segmentation more and more here at Compete, I took a look at areas online where Helio might be able to find Korean Americans and target them with advertising. So I used Behavior Match to check on the online habits of Korean-Americans. Behavior Match is Compete’s service that indexes all the sites on the web for a certain segment against the general US online population.

When looking at the sites where Korean Americans strongly over-index one category stood out: online video. Korean Americans were five (or more) times more likely to visit certain popular video sites than the general population. I’m not sure why that is, but these sites could be good spots to place advertising for Helio — or even Korean ads for Helio Powered by SK Telecom.

• Veoh.com (Korean Americans are 5.3x more likely to visit than general visitors): Veoh is an online TV site with thousands of videos. Veoh has some Korean-language content, but it is mainly focused on US TV.
• Rapidshare.com (7.2x more likely to visit): Rapidshare is an online file-sharing site that is popular for video sharing.
• Megaupload.com (6.1x more likely to visit): Like Rapidshare, Megaupload is a file sharing site with a video angle.
• Megavideo.com (5.2x more likely to visit): Megavideo is Megaupload’s answer to YouTube and some of the traffic it sees links in from Megaupload.

Among these sites Veoh is the clear leader in overall traffic, and also leads in terms of time spent on site.

With a high concentration of Korean American visitors and significant time spent on the sites by all visitors, these five may be excellent media buys for Helio, or anyone looking to target the Korean American segment.

The song remains the same at the top of the Video rankings in March: YouTube continues to outpace the market, growing 7.8% while the video viewing sessions across the web grew only 2.3%.

Meanwhile Veoh narrowly maintained its spot in the Top 10, with phenomenal 23.8% monthly growth, edging out CBS Interactive by a very thin margin. The CBS Interactive division includes Sportsline.com, which scored a 154% gain as the prime spot for watching live streaming March Madness games.

Meanwhile Joost, which is backed by CBS, presented the games as a live streaming “experiment.” While Joost works via client, the March Madness offering did not bring much in the way of new visitors to the site to download the player.

Advertisers placed $545 million on TV for the 2008 NCAA Tournament, according to TNS, but just a tiny fraction of that followed online. With 8.5 million consumers watching next-day tournament highlights and interacting with NCAA Basketball content on the web, there was a huge opportunity to reach March Madness fans and perhaps to do it with more efficient media buys.

We used Compete’s BehaviorMatch, which can be customized for any demographic or behavioral segment, to call out the top video sites for March Madness fans.

While Sportsline came out on top in terms of Composition, predictably, some unexpected sports video sites like Runners World and The Golf Channel also scored high. Meanwhile, the largest sites like YouTube and MySpace aggregated the most eyeballs but had the worst Composition scores.

Those worried that our country is swiftly going to hell in a hand basket will find little comfort in the list below.

In just over two years, YouTube has skyrocketed in popularity to become a dominant part of our popular culture. Over 62 million Americans, or 1 in 3 people online in the U.S., visited YouTube in March. What types of videos are all these people looking for on the site?

The table below lists the 10 of the 25 most popular search terms on YouTube.com last month. In addition to the prevalence of sex related terms, YouTube is used by many as a convenient way to view music videos on-demand. In essence it’s an inexpensive, albeit limited, version of iTunes.

Follow the link to see the complete list of top YouTube search terms in March, and while you’re there, be sure to check out other interesting data Compete has made available on our recently launched “Data Hub.”

The Writers’ Strike may have put a damper on online episodes of America’s favorite TV shows, but it certainly didn’t hold back the country from checking out video coverage of the primary election during the Super Duper Tuesday month of February.

While traffic to online TV episodes and related video was essentially flat at the major portals in February due to a lack of fresh TV content and news, unique viewers at news and politics sites like CNN and MSNBC took a sharp increase from the historic Super Tuesday. On balance, the Top 10 competitors had 5.3% average growth.

The exception was AOL, which just started streaming episodes from all 4 broadcast networks on February 14th. Unique video viewers at AOL were up 19.7% versus the prior month.

Video viewers at Time Warner’s CNN grew 16% while MSNBC enjoyed a 22% increase as visitors tuned in to catch the latest on the hotly contested presidential primaries. (MSNBC is a 50/50 joint venture between NBC and MSN, with traffic attributed accordingly.)

Meanwhile some online video startups were nipping at the heels of the Top 10. There’s been phenomenal growth of video on the web over the past year. Here is just a sampling of the Fastest Movers, ranked by percentage growth in February of this year vs. 2007.*

• GodTube.com tops the list, with supernatural growth since launch in Spring of 2007.
• VBS.tv, Jack9.com, Current.com and Rocketboom.com are sources of originally produced content. These so-called “broadband studios” are producing innovative and, in some cases, exclusive content that has captured loyal followings.
• ExpertVillage.com, VideoJug.com and Instructables.com are geared around instructional videos. They are quickly creating a treasure trove of content and communities around the frequently occurring “how-to ________” search query.
• Veoh is the only site to make it into both the Fastest Growing Sites and Top Video Competitors.

*Note that sites launched after February, 2007 (for example, funnyordie.com and 5min.com) were not considered in this analysis.

Gone are the days when the Internet was for checking email or searching for the meaning of the word “doppelganger”. Now booking vacations, paying bills and shopping are every day online activities for most people. With such an abundance of things to do on the Internet, many companies find themselves challenged to keep their customers interested and engaged.

One of the new and cool things you can do online that’s near and dear to me personally is watch videos. And I don’t just mean YouTube. More and more people (me being one of them) are developing an appetite for watching full-length movies and/or TV shows online. Advertisers are interested in online video too, hoping that these users will provide an engaged audience for their marketing messages.

Online video sites have delivered promising stats recently. For example, Netflix’s WatchNow, which allows subscribers to any Netflix plan to watch full-length movies and TV episodes online from their collection, had 69% more people using the service this quarter as compared to last quarter. Veoh.com, which allows users to view and share short YouTube-like videos as well as stream full-length TV show episodes, has grown from just under 1.5M Unique Visitors one year ago to over 6M in February (although their traffic has likely declined due to the recent writers’ strike). Barely out of its beta phase, the new kid on the block, Hulu.com, offers both full-length movies and TV shows including the most recent in-season episodes. Despite its newness it has already started gaining traction.

With video becoming an interesting and engaging activity online, everyone is trying to capitalize. Take telecommunications providers for example. Most of them were in business long before the Internet existed and many of us rely on them for such necessary services as our home phone line, cable TV and broadband Internet. Our neighborhood Telcos have since gone beyond mere service providers by building and maintaining customer-centric portals (e.g. myembarq.com or comcast.net). Driving engagement on these portals by offering video viewing (as well as news, email and other activities) also brings Telcos a piece of the ad revenue pie – as long as they can get their customers there.

So are their attempts working? Virtually all customer portals currently offer short news videos and movie trailers but that hasn’t been enough to generate interest yet.

Only 10% of Comcast.net visitors also go to its videos section, and the numbers are even lower for other Telco providers. User-generated content has proven difficult to achieve as well. Comcast tried it with Ziddio.com which only attracted 0.2% of Comcast.net traffic in February.

On the other hand, an emerging success story that has effectively leveraged increased interest in watching TV online is Comcast’s Fancast service. Fancast.com successfully integrates content like OnDemand listings and movie trailers with the ability to watch free full-length episodes of popular TV shows.

Judging by recent traffic this approach appears to be working. The number of fancast.com Unique Visitors has nearly quadrupled since November.

Online video is clearly attracting consumer attention. However the question remains as to which providers will capitalize on the trend before watching TV & movies online becomes as common as checking email. Can portal sites become “the place to watch online video”? This story should be one to watch in the future. Stay tuned.

May I have the envelope please… the award for this past week’s fastest moving website has got to be none other than the official domain of the Academy Awards. On Oscar Sunday, February 24, Oscar.com shot up 601% to 214,410 unique viewers vs. the day before.

As we wrote about last week, thousands were searching forOscar gold earlier this month at Oscar.com, the Wikipedia entries for the Academy Awards, and IMDb’s Road to the Oscars ‘08.

Oscar.com delivered this year’s bold performance on somewhat dodgy staging. With the writer’s strike holding back critical advertising and promotion of the awards show until the last minute, television audiences were down 20% versus last year. Yet Oscar.com was down only 6.4%.

Moreover, long term trends between Oscar.com visitors and TV audiences show low correlation. In 2004, for instance, when “Lord of the Rings” won best picture, the Oscars had a 5-year TV audience high while Oscar.com had a record low. Yet in 2007, when TV audiences spiked to see “The Departed” win best picture, visitors also flocked to Oscar.com.

This low correlation implies an online opportunity, yet the Academy is still missing cues online, with no live streaming and video from inside the Awards show restricted to press clips.

Like the never-ending montages, this year’s Oscars channel on YouTube rehashes moments from the vault. Unauthorized footage appearing on YouTube was quickly taken down at the Academy’s request, just like last year when clips of Jack Black and Will Ferrell’s duet racked up huge online viewership, only to be dealt the same fate.

It takes some seriously celebrity-obsessed searching to find those heartfelt acceptance speeches from 2008 online… Over at Oscar.com, there is just a “Thank You Cam” of the winners’ backstage reaction.