James Delahunty
26 Feb 2007 7:34
After Viacom Inc. demanded that YouTube remove about 100,000 clips from the service and ran off to sign a deal with Joost instead, the media focus helped to drive YouTube's traffic up 14% according to analysts at Hitwise. According to LeeAnn Prescott, writing on the Hitwise Intelligence Analysts Weblogs, this is double the average weekly traffic increase since the start of the year.
YouTube currently sits as the 12th most visited website on the entire Internet, behind giants like Yahoo, MSN, MySpace, Google and Hotmail. However, while it sits behind all of those other major Internet resources, all of the combined traffic of all U.S. Television networks' websites is still far behind YouTube's traffic.
The 56 TV cable and broadcast networks received about 0.48% of US internet traffic while YouTube dragged in 0.60% of all U.S. Internet traffic during the week of 17th February. "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", Prescott wrote.
YouTube is currently negotiating with several content providers, reportedly including the BBC.
Source:
Pocket-Lint.co.uk