It’s been nothing but up for YouTube lately, a hill steep enough to send a few key competitors tumbling backwards. MySpace added a video component? Wouldn’t know it by recent stats. Viacom copyright lawyers strip-searching everybody? So, what? Traffic’s never been better.
According to Compete.com, YouTube controls a 43.3 share of the online video market in January, up from 41.1 percent in December. That translates to 31.7 million unique visitors, up two million in one month. Meanwhile, MySpace Video is down by nearly the same amounts.
Add Google Video’s 10 percent market share and you have Google owning, again, over 50 percent of an Internet market. The top ten Web video sites are:
1. YouTube
2. MySpace
3. Google Video
4. AOL Video
5. MSN Video
6. StupidVideos
7. Yahoo Video
8. Break
9. eBaum’s World
10. Daily Motion
It seems nothing, not even sweeping copyright concerns or Rupert Murdoch have been able to derail YouTube’s success. Hitwise’s LeeAnn Prescott reports that since Viacom’s famous 100,000 video raid on the video-sharing site, YouTube traffic has gone up 14 percent, double its average weekly increase.
That pushes YouTube to the number 12 domain, behind MySpace domains, Google, Yahoo domains, Hotmail, MSN, eBay, Live Search, and Facebook.
But perhaps a more felt impact is on the traffic YouTube is draining from TV network websites. As of February 3rd, YouTube attracted more traffic than to all the television network sites combined.
“This is a landmark event in the changing face of web traffic and entertainment consumption,” writes Prescott, “now that entertainment seekers are now more likely to go to YouTube than any other television network or gaming website. The custom category of 56 television cable and broadcast network sites received 0.4865% of all US Internet traffic for the week ending 2/17/07, while YouTube received 0.6031%.”
The next step then, is getting a grip on all this copyright hullabaloo. Maybe this new patent for “YouTube watermarks” will be just the ticket.
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