This morning I was reading an excellent piece on Ars Technica asking the question Did "Lazy Sunday" make YouTube's $1.5 billion sale possible?. I looked back at our data and blog posts over the past few years to see whether we can help answer the question. To remind readers, "Lazy Sunday" refers to a Saturday Night Live "rap about a pair of lame white guys from the Village who wanted nothing more than to spend a Sunday afternoon in the theater, watching The Chronicles of Narnia". NBC Universal's general counsel, Rick Cotton, said (at DMW's Future of Television Forum East last week) that he believes that the SNL skit vaulted YouTube to popularity. We blogged about this skit the week after it aired in December 2005, showing that in one week, the skit propelled YouTube ahead of Google Video with much of that traffic coming from MySpace. Visits continued to climb from there.

The Lazy Sunday video was pulled off of YouTube in February and visits continued to climb. The following chart shows the share of US Internet visits to YouTube from October 2005 to present and the second isolates the first year, showing October 2005 to October 2006.

I have marked the points at which the Lazy Sunday video was added and removed in the single year chart.

As you can see, Lazy Sunday was indeed an early video that propelled YouTube to the fore. I looked at our clickstream data and found that in the early months (until February 2007) visits to YouTube came mostly from Social Networks (MySpace) and email services, reminding us of the viral nature of YouTube's early growth. As recently as October of 2007 visits from Search Engines overtook those from Social Networks.

YouTube's brand is of course now fully developed and nearly one third of the site's traffic comes from search, the majority of which are searches for variations of the YouTube brand name. In October 2008, 32% of visits to YouTube came from a Search Engine, 21% from Social Networks and 7% from Email Services.

Later this week we will be publishing the top YouTube site search terms. In other words, the terms that consumers enter into the search bar on YouTube.com. Stay tuned for some surprises!

Heather Hopkins

Heather Hopkins is VP of Research for Hitwise UK. This piece was originally posted on Hitwise Analyst blog here.