Spend a few minutes on YouTube, and it’s easy to find the videos most popular among users of the site. While looking at what viewers watched is indeed interesting, looking back a step to see what visitors to the site actually wanted to watch (evidenced by what they searched for), provides an unfiltered peek into users intentions for visiting the site.

The list below shows the top 40 terms visitors to YouTube searched for on the video sharing website in June. Although YouTube’s Community Guidelines state that the site is “not for pornography or sexually explicit content,” apparently a large percentage of YouTube’s audience has yet to get the message, or remain undaunted in their quest to find such material on the site.

Also interesting: music videos command the majority of the top searches. 28 of the top 40 terms searched on YouTube in June related to either a musician (if you can call some that) or a song title. While the record labels have created popular channels on YouTube, pirated videos continue to command a significant amount of total views. R&B artist Rihanna’s popular “Take a Bow” video, for example, has been viewed over 15 million times on the Universal Music Group channel. That accounts for just 40% of total views of the video on YouTube.

Click here to see the complete list of top 40 YouTube search terms in June, and while you’re there, be sure to check out other interesting data Compete has made available on our “Data Hub.”

Things are heating up in online video and it’s not just the nice summer weather. In May, Disney-owned ABC made its first public move to embrace online distribution by signing up with Veoh.com.

The move could be seen as a defensive play against Hulu, the NBCU-News Corp joint venture and ABC has previously announced plans to release an embed-friendly player this fall, though not ruled out working with Hulu.

While Veoh.com shows up much higher in Compete’s ranking of on-site video viewing visits, Hulu.com actually plays host to ABC visitors slightly more often (4.7% vs. 4% in May).

In May, Veoh.com, a top-ranked destination for many months, gained 2 spots to 7th place, claiming 2.7% share of all video viewing visits on the web. Hulu also leapt ahead 2 spots, coming in at 17th with 0.7% share.

Google continued to dominate with 45.5% share of all visits and grew faster than the competition, gaining 1.5 share points versus April 2008.

Note: We recently augmented our methodology so the figures above may be slightly different compared to last month’s post. However, last month’s post is unchanged in terms of ranking, as well as direction and magnitude of growth rates.

Meanwhile, it’s not just the networks following eyeballs online. Fancast has been dueling with Hulu around the 1M UV mark for the past 3 months. The Comcast-owned video aggregator actually distributes Hulu content, but they compete for ad dollars.

Hulu recently edged ahead of Fancast in reach, but there’s no contest when it comes to visits - Hulu is churning out far more engagement from its audience.

However, Comcast made an interesting move earlier this week when it bought Movies.com. While Movies.com is more of a guide to what’s in theaters now, it does show previews and bulk up Comcast’s portfolio.

Hulu.com, the online video site owned jointly by NBC Universal and News Corporation (Fox) launched earlier this year, currently streams numerous network and cable television programs (and a few movies too), including the majority of NBC’s and Fox’s Primetime lineups. Both Fox.com and NBC.com continue to stream most of their respective programming, either in the form of clips or full episodes, free of charge and with far fewer commercials than the televised broadcast. There are numerous third party video sites to view streaming television content, but viewers have traditionally gone to a network’s official website the most. Now that there is an alternative to the official site which is owned by two of the networks themselves, where are the viewers going to watch their shows online?

Here we look at the top five comedies for both Fox and NBC and observe the share of the total combined time spent viewing these episodes on their respective homepages and Hulu.com. For the top five comedies on Fox, viewers spend more than twice as much time watching on Hulu.com than they do on Fox.com. For the top NBC comedies, NBC.com barely edges out Hulu.com in total viewing time. This is only because The Office, which happens to be the most watched show (in total online viewing time) on either network, is watched primarily on NBC.com. When The Office is excluded, Hulu’s total time share of the remaining four NBC comedies jumps up to 60%.

Below we see the top five comedies for each network and quantified how much time was spent viewing that specific show on its network’s official website versus Hulu.com.

When observing the top five dramas on each of the two networks, a completely different picture is painted. The vast majority of the time spent viewing these programs online occurs on either Fox.com or NBC.com. Very little time is spent watching any of these programs on Hulu.com.

Hulu.com’s visitors seem to prefer watching comedic content rather than dramas. Recently, Hulu acquired the rights to stream full episodes of The Daily Show with John Stewart and The Colbert Report. Hulu is already a factor when it comes to streaming network comedies, so it will be interesting to see what impact adding these two shows will have.

When will the YouTube phenomenon slow down? Laws of math and physics suggest it has to some time, but it certainly wasn’t in April. YouTube shot up 2.4 points in market share, way faster than any of its competitors, to set a new record of 50.4% of all video viewing sessions on the web.

Meanwhile Yahoo!, MySpace and TimeWarner dipped slightly. Also, Veoh slid a bit in April, but continues to outperform with the second best year/year growth, after the YouTube juggernaut.

ManiaTV and Heavy saw modest gains in April. For these two independents, the upticks are good news, but maybe not good enough – both have seen major drops in traffic over the past 12 months.

Hulu still has a ways to go to catch up to older rivals, at least in terms of unique visitors at each domain. After the NBCU-Fox Joint Venture’s big debut in March, I expected the typical post- hype drop-off. While this happened to an extent, with unique video viewers contracting 12%, the site actually made up for lost viewers with better engagement, snagging a 5.6% increase in video viewing sessions and inching 0.1% in market share.

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.