YouTube still has more visitors than rival sites combined

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.

The U.S. market share of visits to YouTube, which Google bought for $1.65 billion last November, rose 70% from January through May, online audience measurement firm Hitwise Inc. said in the survey published Wednesday.

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

"As of May 2007, YouTube's market share was 50% 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% in May, according to Hitwise. Its closest rival, News Corp.'s MySpace Videos site, had 16.08% of market share, the survey of Web surfing habits showed.

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

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

Viacom 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.

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