The big buzz-maker this week has been the announcement from News Corp and NBC regarding their joint video site.  Some say it's a YouTube killer.  Some say it's not.  But one of the things that most people agree on is that distribution is going to play a big role in the success (or lack of) this venture.  By striking deals with AOL, Yahoo, MySpace, and Microsoft to distribute their videos, News Corp and NBC have the potential to generate a lot of traffic to their new site.

LeeAnn Prescott at Hitwise published some numbers yesterday indicating that MySpace alone has the ability to drastically increase traffic to a site.  In fact, upstream traffic to MSN's video site from MySpace increased MSN viewership by a factor of six in just one week.

But what about the combined audiences from all of the partner sites?

Steve Rubel wrote about a site called AttentionMeter that lets you "triangulate" data from Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast.  While playing around with it this morning I got an idea:  why not look at the traffic data for these major partners and compare that data to YouTube's?

I decided to go with Quantcast because it gives you the ability to drill down into specific subdomains.  I wanted to compare overall traffic and traffic to the video subdomains alone.  The results show that YouTube may get more than a little competition from the un-named News Corp/NBC site.

*Quantcast data on videos.yahoo.com is sparse. I used movies.yahoo.com as a rough estimate (similar audience, right?)

As you can see, the News Corp/NBC site definitely has the potential to match YouTube's audience.  In fact, with the combined overall audiences of the distribution partners, the new site has the potential, in theory, to beat YouTube's audience ten times over. 

Like I said yesterday, the successfulness of this deal most likely hinges on getting eyeballs.  The media companies have the content that folks want.  If they can get enough people to use the service it should be a hit (baring any over-advertising-ification or usability issues).  And while it is by no means scientific, the data compiled above illustrates the potential audience available to these guys.

Let's see if they use it wisely.