YouTube traffic share exceeds others

Online video sharing service YouTube has continued to experience strong growth this year.

The latest traffic data from online competitive intelligence firm Hitwise suggesting that the website´s market share is 50 per cent larger than all other video sites combined.

The research indicated that the market share of US visits to YouTube increased by 70 per cent from January to May 2007, excluding streams and embedded videos on other sites, while the market share of 64 other sites offering similar services increased by only eight per cent over the same period.

Google´s YouTube was top of the video market share table with 60 per cent of the total traffic, followed by MySpace videos which captured 16 per cent and Google Videos which only managed 7.8 per cent.

The Hitwise study also revealed that search engines were responsible for 20 per cent of all traffic to video websites, indicating that there has been a 300 per cent increase in the amount of video site traffic emanating from a search engine query over the past 12 months.