YouTube Visits Up 14% Since Viacom Takedown Order

Authored by Hitwise on February 25, 2007 - 4:21pm.

The follwing is a blog entry from LeeAnn Prescott at Hitwise: YouTube's traffic has not suffered since Viacom demanded that it remove 100,000 video clips on February 2, 2007. The market share of US visits to YouTube increased by 13.9% in the two week period between the weeks ending 2/3/07 and 2/17/07, and its average weekly traffic increase since the start of the year was 7%. As of 2/20/07, YouTube ranked as the 12th most visited Internet domain in the US. The sites that received more traffic than YouTube were MySpace domains, Google, Yahoo domains, Hotmail, MSN, eBay, Live Search, and Facebook.

During the week of February 3, YouTube's traffic surged above the combined traffic to all of the television network websites.* This is a landmark event in the changing face of web traffic and entertainment consumption, 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 custom category of television networks excludes news, sports, weather, and shopping networks, whose websites serve a distinct purpose beyond supporting their unique television content, and does not include individual television show websites such as American Idol and The Simpsons. Here is a list of the top 10 sites in that custom category.

Now that Google owns the leading entertainment website in the US, it is faced with the challenge of offering copyright protections to content owners. This is a case in which user behavior is far ahead of the technology that content owners need to harness it, and hopefully companies like Audible Magic (via Techcrunch) or the start up Attributor (via WSJ) will make this possible.

Note: This post originally appeared on Hitwise blog here.

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Comments

Its not just youtube whose

Submitted by john (not verified) on February 26, 2007 - 6:47am.

Its not just youtube whose traffic is surging. Many of the video content websites have experienced an upswing. It's interesting to read that Youtube's early february traffic was greater than the combined traffic of all the network websites. Youtube clones like http://www.dailymotion.com are also benefiting from the increased attention paid to these type sites. Interestingly there are even youtube-type free porn videos sites like http://www.freepornvideos69.com (NSFW) that have popped up to take advantage of this phenomenon. We can probably expect the big network websites to offer even more vidoes to try to compete in the future.

Good news for Google

Submitted by YottaPixel (not verified) on February 27, 2007 - 2:02pm.

With its new data centers, Google (which owns YouTube) is poised to become the video delivery network of the coming decades, and it’s a sure bet that the Viacoms of the world will want access to that network sometime soon.

Taylor-made graphs

Submitted by What is YouTube? (not verified) on March 10, 2007 - 2:00pm.

I like the way the "weekly share of US internet visits" graph was special-taylored to show YouTube catching up and passing the TV Networks. Why were news, weather, sports, and shopping websites not including in the graph? So that YouTube would be on top in the end, of course! Stop manipulating the news to fit your stories.