YouTube traffic bigger than its rivals' combined

YouTube has achieved an increase in the United States audience share that makes it much larger than the next 64 video-sharing websites combined.

A survey has found that the United States market share of visits to YouTube, which Google bought for US $1.65 billion in November 2006, rose by 70% from January 2007 through May 2007, online audience measurement firm Hitwise said in a survey.

By contrast, visits to the next 64 largest sites tracked by Hitwise rose only by 8% in the first five months of 2007.

According to LeeAnn Prescott, Hitwise research director, as of May 2007, YouTube’s market share was 50% greater than those 64 sites combined.

Prescott presented the data at the Searchnomics Internet industry conference held in Silicon Valley on June 27, 2007.

YouTube’s share of the US online video market was 60.2% in May 2007. Its closest rival, News Corporation’s MySpace Videos site, had 16.08% of market share.

Google Video, YouTube’s sister website, held 7.81%, while Yahoo had 2.77%, and Microsoft’s MSN had 2.09%.

Start-up Metacafe ranked number 8 in US visitors to video sites with 1.07%, Time Warner’s AOL Media had 0.94%, and Veoh was number 10 at 0.86%.

Viacom had filed a copyright infringement suit against YouTube in March 2007 seeking over US $1 billion in damages and demanded that YouTube take down thousands of segments from its popular programmes, including The Daily Show with John Stewart, The Colbert Report and South Park.

A separate suit was filed in early May 2007 by plaintiffs, including the English Premier League.

Both suits argued that YouTube encouraged massive copyright infringement to boost the site’s traffic in the hopes of generating advertising sales.

Google responded by saying that these lawsuits threaten the way people exchange information, news, entertainment and artistic expression over the internet.

Many of the most popular YouTube videos come from so-called user-generated sources. The site’s slogan is ‘Broadcast Yourself.’

YouTube also features unrestricted professional media programming like music videos, extreme sports feats like skateboarding, and politicians promoting their campaigns.

The Hitwise statistics track visitors to video sites, but do not capture whether or not visitors actually watched the video streams or embedded videos from these sites.