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.

February has been a big month for online video. Google announced plans to incorporate video ads into search results. YouTube launched video ads in a big way. And Yahoo! Video re-launched with wider screen and enhanced social networking features.

Overall, the online video market grew 3% for the month. Compete tracks US-based traffic to 50+ online video properties.

YouTube continued to lead the pack, with a market share hovering around 50% since August.

Meanwhile, ManiaTV, which features indie music and news on Hollywood scene, caught attention with a 40% surge in visits on a 15% lift in unique visitors. Shows from B-list celebrities like Tom Green and Dave Navarro kept viewers coming back..

That’s good news for ManiaTV, especially since the 2nd string/niche video aggregators (think Heavy and Break) are tightening around 3.5 – 4M unique visitors.

Lastly, the new Yahoo! Video brings videos across the Yahoo! network and enables users to build out video-based profiles and join a community. On the February 15th launch, the site featured an exclusive: a trailer for the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

YouTube.com continued to lead the field of video contenders in December, commanding 52.3% market share with 238M Visits on 59M Unique Visitors, up 6.1% from November and 40% since December, 2006. The overall online video market, which consists of Compete’s classification of over 50 sites and subdomains serving video to US-based visitors, grew 7.4% for the month.

Meanwhile, jostling among the portals continued in the mid-field, with Yahoo!, AOL and MSN trading places for the 4th time in as many months.

MySpace lost 6% video market share and slid to 5th place for the first time ever. A year ago, MySpace held 2nd place among video contenders, with 19% market share.

Back in 2006, many credited MySpace with fueling YouTube’s meteoric rise. The social networking giant hosted and referred millions of videos and visitors to the video sharing juggernaut. Look for YouTube to overtake MySpace in 2008.

Veoh.com continued to lead the back of the pack with 16M visits on 6M visitors, down 6.7% in December, but up an astonishing 2,451.3% for the year.

As I previously noted, Veoh.com leads the field in terms of Engagement, with long-form videos capturing visitors’ attention for 15.5 minutes per visit. The only other competitor to reach this level of Engagement in 2007 was YouTube, with 17 minutes per visit.

Veoh.com recently announced it will be adding more videos from traditional TV networks, including Hulu.com, the NBC-Fox joint venture. Hulu, though still in private beta, has shot up to 250K visitor in just 5 months. Though probably not significant due to just starting out, Hulu also approached Engagement levels seen at Veoh and YouTube.

Rounding out the pack, Heavy.com sustained one of the biggest losses of the month, coming down 34.9% for 2007. Meanwhile Metacafe.com posted respectable gains, up 113.5% for the year.