YouTube storms the internet

17-07-2006

by Maxim Kelly

YouTube is at the vanguard of websites combining video with social networking content, according to new figures.

Statistics from internet strategists at Hitwise show the market share of visits to the ten leading video sites increased a staggering 164 percent between February and May this year.

Free-to-use video-sharing site YouTube, by far the most popular service, saw its market share of visits increase by 160 percent in the three-month period, and -- although barely one year old -- it now accounts for 29 percent of the online US multimedia market.

The BBC reported that 2.5 billion videos were watched on YouTube last month, while the company claims 60 percent of all online videos watched in the US are viewed on its service. Blogs by editors at the BBC also voiced concern that the YouTube site was increasingly becoming a source for people to download clips from mainstream broadcasters, raising piracy and copyright questions.

Videos are downloaded free from the site and YouTube is still working on developing advertising and other means of generating revenue to support the business. The company is based in California and has just over 30 employees. The income potential of TouTube is strong, with Nielsen/NetRatings recording nearly 20 million unique users per month.

One video-sharing service with a business model YouTube may imitate in the future is Revver. It splices ads into videos and splits the revenue with the content creator.

Meanwhile, global social networking supremo MySpace has close to a 19 percent share of the video market, according to Hitwise. MySpace also provided more than 20 percent of YouTube's traffic in February and March, before it launched its own video-sharing service by placing a 'videos' link on every profile page in March.

However, analysts at Hitwise commented that surfers spent nearly three times as long on YouTube as they did on MySpace videos, "demonstrating a high level of engagement between YouTube's content and its visitors," the report stated.

"The rapid growth of online video sites in the past six months demonstrates a major shift in online behaviour," said senior Hitwise researcher LeeAnn Prescott. "The internet is quickly moving from static web pages to an environment rich with interaction and user-generated multimedia content."

Yahoo, MSN, Google and AOL all trail YouTube and MySpace in video site rankings, with each only having 3 to 5 percent of the video search market.