I’ve written before about the impressive speed of YouTube’s bursting on the scene.  But to really understand how quickly this all happened, you need only click on this chart from Alexa, which documents YouTube’s emergence from nowhere to a Top 10 site ranking in just over 12 months.  And YouTube represents only about a 40% share of the video search market; other significant players include video services from Yahoo, Google, MySpace, and Grouper.

Say what you will about YouTube and its bretheren’s often sophomoric content, their most important contribution to our community of marketing professionals, interested in streaming video, is that they have brought web video viewing squarely into the mainstream.  I can already foresee the day when sites without video and motion graphics features will be considered as vanilla as we consider all-text sites today.  That is a consequence of this mainstreaming of web video, and smart marketers and their webmasters are already planning the product demonstrations, customer testimonials and case studies, user tips, and other video material that will become part of the next era of website content.