July is named for Julius Ceaser, and like that Roman Emperor, YouTube “saw and conquered” the world of online video again a month ago. The undisputed leader of online video claimed 49% share of video viewing visits, up 1.3 percentage points versus June and 8.1 versus a year earlier.

July was also the second time that YouTube overtook MySpace in terms of US-based unique visitors at the domain level. The previous occasion was April, 2008.

Over the past two years, YouTube steadily approached MySpace, building enormous momentum from a base of 20 million UV’s. Since it caught up with MySpace in February, 2008, YouTube’s surge has leveled around 60 million UV’s.

At the other end of the Top 20 ranking, Blinkx and Crackle made some incredible jumps, although minor in the grand scheme of online video. Blinkx was up 1,036% versus a year ago, claiming 16th place in July.

Crackle was up 839%, at the 17th spot, helped along by the popularity of its “Minisodes Network,” which features old network TV shows like “I Dream of Jeannie” and the original “Charlie’s Angels”, repurposed into fast-paced, 5-minute shorts for the web.

YouTube continued its inexorable drive upward and onward in June, propelling Google to new heights of a 47.8% market share of all video viewing visits on the web. That’s up 2.3 share points versus May and nearly 14 points compared to a year ago.

Meanwhile the best of the rest gave up share to GooTube, with Yahoo! in particular taking a big hit of .7 share points in June and FIM/MySpace sliding 5.3 points over the prior 12 months.

Also hurting on the leaderboard was ABC, which took at 1.1 point hit with the end of the primetime season and fresh episodes of shows like Lost and Grey’s Anatomy. Somehow NBC managed to buck the trend and add .2 points in June.

Hulu and Veoh, which aggregates content network, also made incremental share gains of .1 and .2, respectively.

At the other end of the Top 20, the off-again/on-again time-waster’s favorite, Jokeroo.com, also posted nice gains in June, cracking up 1.1% share of all video visits.

Things haven’t been so amusing over at Funnyordie.com, the Will Ferrel comedy site, which cancelled the “Kung Fu Todd” series and has been on a slow decline since it roiled internet video pundits and plebs alike with The Landlord.

Vimeo.com has been making steady gains over the past few months, with Unique Video Viewers up 27% in June and 332% for the year.

While smaller than Jokeroo and Funny or Die, Vimeo apparently has some very engaging content. The IAC-backed site stacked up greater attention in June than either of its peers.

My new favorite television show is Dexter, which tells the story of a serial killer who only preys on the bad guys. After marathon viewings of season one on video, and waiting impatiently for season two to be released, I stumbled on links on Hulu to episodes on Showtime’s site.

Branding is important for cable networks, as it helps attract advertisers and cable subscribers. Online video is new, and I’m probably a lead user, but this whole experience made me wonder: how are these rival cable sites doing when it comes to attracting audiences online?

In terms of traffic, as shown in the chart below, Showtime has been gaining on HBO in the last year. The unique visitors are, perhaps not surprisingly, lower than NBC.comw and CBS.com, but similar to the professional content aggregator sites like Hulu or Comcast’s Fancast.

However, if we look at time spent, which matters when watching video, Showtime and HBO’s sites don’t fare as well. As we can see in the chart below: the average HBO visitor is on the site for about five minutes, the average Showtime visitor for only about 20% of that. Even though their traffic is similar in terms of volume to HBO’s, Hulu has been drawing in users that stay longer, on average, since the end of last year.

These cable network sites offer features that Hulu and Fancast don’t. But, if a cable network wants to capture more attention of an online audience, how could it start?

Part of the answer might be in online video promotion through search. People like me who are on Hulu often might just look for one of these titles there, but search is used much more universally. And when using search, networks aren’t always the most obvious choice as a viewing destination.

I tried an experiment with search analytics on the titles of four shows from these networks: Dexter (Showtime), Weeds (Showtime), Entourage (HBO), and The Wire (HBO). As shown in the chart below:

• When the search term was the title, networks were always the #1 destination site
• When the search term was the word “watch” and the title, none of the #1 destination sites was the show’s network, and 3 were video aggregation sites
• When “watch” and the title was the search term, the network was a top 10 destination site for only one show: Weeds

Of course, online viewing is not the only way to build a brand and a loyal audience on the web, or the only role for cable network sites. However, as more people begin to watch TV online, the question of how much to invest in bringing that audience to a specific site and encourage them to spend time there will be an important one.

In the meantime, I’ll be watching some Dexter online.

*** UPDATE*** Since this blog was originally posted, we got some feedback from Showtime that the average time visitors spent on their site seemed low. After re-running the numbers for all four sites, I found that the average time spent per person on Showtime’s site was indeed greater than originally stated, averaging about 6.3 minutes between June 2007 and June 2008. A revised chart on average time spent on each of the four sites during this period is shown below.

We appreciate all feedback on our blog and additional perspectives on the online video space.

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.