YouTube continues video dominance

YouTube continued to hold its huge lead over competing video services, claiming a larger share of the online video market than the next 64 sites combined. 

A survey by research firm Hitwise measuring US visits to video sharing sites in May recorded a 60 percent market share for YouTube. 

MySpace came second with a 16.08 per cent market share, followed by Google Video with 7.81 percent.

Google, which acquired YouTube for US$1.65bn in October 2006, had nearly 68 percent of all online video traffic in May. The survey measured only website traffic, not embedded videos or streams.

YouTube is also growing faster than competing sites. The study found that YouTube's share of all US web traffic had grown by 70 percent since May 2006, while the 64 other top video sites had grown by just eight percent.

YouTube is benefiting from its parent company as well. Hitwise found that the amount of traffic being directed to video sharing sites from search engines has climbed by 300 percent since May 2006.

Hitwise research director Lee Ann Prescott noted that traffic from search engines, including Google, now accounts for one fifth of all traffic to YouTube.

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