YouTube trounces nearest rivals

YouTube’s audience is now 50 percent larger than all 64 of its nearest rivals audiences combined, according to new Hitwise figures.

by Helen Leggatt

hitwise%20logo2.gif While visits toYouTube’s 64 nearest rivals rose 8 percent over the first five months of 2007, the audience for the video-sharing site, which Google purchased for $1.65 billion last November, rose 70 percent.

YouTube's share of the U.S. internet video market was just over 60 percent in May 2007, according to the report’s author, LeeAnn Prescott of Hitwise. Its nearest rival, MySpace Videos, had just short of 17 percent of the market followed by Google Video with 7.8 percent, Yahoo with 2.7 percent and in fifth place MSN with 2 percent.

Hitwise also touches on the rise in traffic from search engines to video sites. Over the last year, May 2006 to May 2007, traffic leaving search engines for video sites has risen 300 percent with more and more search results bring up links to videos. “Clearly optimizing your videos for search is just as important as getting your videos up on the web,” reads the summary.