Mefeedia released their second quarterly "State of the Vlogosphere" and found that more and more content creators are launching their own video websites and using video sharing sites such as YouTube as promotional tools for their own sites.

Where are the video blogs?
According to the data collected by Mefeedia, 61% of episodic online video is on independent websites, 14% on Blip.tv, and 9% on YouTube. Get the full online video statistics here. One key trend: YouTube's percentage dipped from 11.1% to 9%. Fewer vloggers on YouTube? No, just that an increased amount of vloggers on YouTube appear to also be setting up their own video blogs via blogging platforms, thus causing an overall decrease in the YouTube percentages. To support this, independent websites' market share was u, increasing from 56.9% to 61%. More and more producers are going independent and trying to attract audiences from a variety of different video sharing sites.

The shift to creating your own video blog and using more content-creator-friendly services should not be a surprise, particularly for content creators looking to produce online video as a business. Your own video blog site allows you to set the terms of what, when and how people view your work and gives the content creator the ability to monetize through advertising and sponsorship. Of course, to attract an audience, YouTube and other video hosting sites are great places to post content that promotes the creator's own website. This enables video producers to capture an audience and try to draw that audience to their own website.

The other benefit to video producers is branding and ownership. As Jay Dedham, a videoblogging pioneer and vlogger at RyanIsHungry.com explains "Having my own blog allows me to control the context of my videos. Ownership is clearly mine. I can learn to interact with my viewing community since i have full control over my site. You can't do these things on sites like Youtube."

Mainstream Media and the Vlogosphere
NBC, ABC, CBS, Sony, Fox -- mainstream media has been entering the vlogosphere in many ways over the past several months. What are all of the mainistream media players doing with the new low-cost distribution methods and "hip, cool" online video audience? Since our last "State of the Vlogosphere", there have been a lot of announcements made including Crackle's launching as Sony Pictures' original content discovery site, CBS acquiring video blog Wallstrip, and MySpace and Fox announcing a "storyteller challenge".

These announcements point to an important trend: the difference between a Web Show and a TV Show is becoming less distinct. Soon in the future, we won't be talking about a "TV Show" and a "Web Show", we will just be talking about a "Show".

Clearly, sites like Mefeedia are important as online video explodes onto more and more indie video sites, video hosting sites such as YouTube and MySpace, and mainstream media video series such the minisode network and NBC webisodes. Consumers will need easy tools to discovery and collect great video from any site and any platform, and be able to watch that video on any device, TV, and player they want to.