YouTube visits larger than rivals combined: survey

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - YouTube, which has had to pull copyrighted
videos off its site after legal attacks by some big media franchises,
has enjoyed a surge in U.S. audience share that leaves it far larger
than the next 64 video-sharing sites combined, a survey found.
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The U.S. market share of visits to YouTube, which Google Inc. bought
for $1.65 billion last November, rose 70 percent from January through
May, online audience measurement firm Hitwise Inc. said in the survey
published on Wednesday.

By contrast, visits to the next 64 largest sites tracked by Hitwise
rose only 8 percent during 2007's first five months.

"As of May 2007, YouTube's market share was 50 percent greater than
those 64 sites combined," Hitwise research director LeeAnn Prescott
said in a summary of her firm's data.

YouTube's share of the U.S. online video market was 60.2 percent in
May, according to Hitwise. Its closest rival, News Corp.'s MySpace
Videos site, had 16.08 percent of market share, the survey of Web
surfing habits showed.

YouTube's sister site, Google Video, held 7.81 percent, while Yahoo
Inc. had 2.77 percent and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, 2.09 percent,
according to the study.

Start-up Metacafe ranked No. 8 in U.S. visitors to video sites with
1.07 percent, Time Warner's AOL Media had 0.94 percent and Veoh was
No. 10 at 0.86 percent, Hitwise said.

Viacom Inc. filed a copyright infringement suit against YouTube in
March seeking more than $1 billion in damages and demanded that
YouTube take down thousands of segments from its popular programs,
including The Daily Show with John Stewart, The Colbert Report and
South Park.

A separate suit was filed in early May by plaintiffs including English
soccer's Premier League. Both suits argue YouTube encourages massive
copyright infringement to boost the site's traffic in the hopes of
generating advertising sales.

Google has responded by saying that these lawsuits threaten the way
people exchange information, news, entertainment and artistic
expression over the Internet.

Many of the most popular YouTube videos come from so-called
user-generated sources -- the bedroom confessional produced by
teenagers with cheap computer Webcams pointing at them is the
archetypal format. The site's slogan is "Broadcast Yourself."

It also features unrestricted professional media programming like
music videos, extreme sports feats like skateboarding, and politicians
promoting their campaigns.

The Hitwise statistics track visitors to video sites, but do not
capture whether or not visitors actually watched the video streams or
embedded videos from these sites, she noted.

Prescott presented the data at the Searchnomics Internet industry
conference held in Silicon Valley on Wednesday.