YouTube's growth has not begun to slow yet this year. Hitwise traffic data shows that the market share of US visits to YouTube has increased by 70% when comparing January 2007 to May 2007 (this only includes site visits, not streams or streams from views on embedded videos). In comparison, the market share of visits to a custom category of 64 other video sites increased by only 8% in that period. As of May 2007, YouTube's market share was 50% greater than those 64 sites combined. Here is a ranking of the top 10 sites in that custom category for May 2007.

Today I will be moderating a panel on video search optimization and marketing at Searchnomics 2007. Search engines are responsible for about 20% of traffic to video sites, including YouTube. Users are increasingly finding links to video pages in search engine results - and going to them. For the four weeks ending June 24, 2006 Hitwise captured 23,696 search terms sending traffic to the custom cateogry of 65 video sites. A year later, for the four weeks ending June 23, 2007, Hitwise captured 110,775 search terms sending traffic to the same category. Not only are more individual searches ending up at video sites, but clickstream data shows that more traffic is leaving search engines for video sites. The chart below shows a 300% increase in the amount of traffic leaving search engines and going to video sites in the past year. Clearly optimizing your videos for search is just as important as getting your videos up on the web. If you can, come to the session and find out what Google and Metacafe have to say about this topic.

LeeAnn Prescott

LeeAnn Prescott is Research Director for Hitwise covering the US market. This post was originally posted on Hitwise blog here.