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YouTube was the 26th most popular site on the Internet in September 2006. Ending my recent responses to the Hitwise Consumer Generated Media report (social networks and photos previously), this is what’s happening in the Web 2.0 video sharing space. Recently acquired by Google, YouTube remains firmly at the top of the video-sharing space, the report says.

Many have attributed the success of YouTube to pirated videos from TV. And frankly, for me, it has been a great way for me to watch some of the best of American TV. As a Brit, I’d never even heard of the Daily Show or the Colbert Report until the appearance of YouTube. That’s obviously been a great thing for Comedy Central and MTV, its parent company.

However, user-generated videos have actually been its mainstay. Only the owners know the real statistics about this, but a visit to the ‘most viewed‘ section of the site will quickly clear up the misconception that illegal TV is the major pull. As I post, only one of the top twenty videos originated from television. The real pull, as the report suggests, was the ability for users to upload videos easily, be able to follow other users’ contributions, and to find videos that provided a major attraction:

YouTube’s draw is not just its controversial hosting of copyrighted content, but its user-uploaded videos that are organized by tags. Tagging and social networking features made it easy for users to find content, and a strong community has developed.

It wasn’t just press and buzz that strengthened YouTube. As with flickr, YouTube provides a human-generated search of multimedia, an area in which machine-generated search is currently weak. The tags, descriptions and comments which place the videos within a semantically-intelligible environment provides means whereby it’s possible to find err.. chavs on a roundabout by putting those words into the search engine. (damn. I am sure there are slightly more respectable examples). 18.1% of YouTube’s traffic comes from search engines.

Key statistics on video:

The market share of visits to YouTube increased by 249% in the six months from March to September 2006, and in September 2006 it was the 26th most visited website by US Internet users.
The market share of visits to MySpace Video has increased similarly, at 253% from March to September 2006. Recent changes by MySpace as of this writing will most likely serve to increase usage for MySpace Video as it seeks to bring YouTube users to its website.
The market share of visits to Google Video increased by 170% between March and September 2006, while visits to Yahoo! Video were up 13% and visits to Metacafe increased by 133%.
The average session time for YouTube, at 18 minutes 33 seconds in September 2006, was the longest among the above online video sites. Average session times for the other video sites were as follows: Metacafe, 11 minutes 58 seconds; Yahoo! Video, 11 minutes 37 seconds; Google Video, 9 minutes 9 seconds; and MySpace Videos, 6 minutes 35 seconds.

And the graph:

So YouTube is on top of the heap by a mile? Maybe not. A recent (November 7) report on Mashable suggests that MySpace has had the muscle to change things. Since the Hitwise report was published, Pete Cashmore reports, things have turned fairly quickly:

Our new data for the month of October shows MySpace leaping ahead of YouTube into the number one spot with dramatic growth. The number of video-embeds on MySpace grew on average 57% between the months of September and October, yet MySpace Videos grew a whopping 93.27%.

The importance of MySpace in serving the rest of the Web 2.0/Social Network environment is duly noted. What remains to be seen is whether cutting access for third parties which can inject content into MySpace pages will strengthen or weaken the Beast.

The report concludes its video section by noting that network effects (more users = still more users - because everyone’s there) has protected YouTube from competition in the same way that MySpace’s dominance of the social networking space has led to growth rather than decline. Whether the network power of a dedicated social network (MySpace) or a video-cum-social-network service (YouTube) will be dominant in the video space remains to be seen. Given the interconnectedness of all of these companies, proving success and providing evidence may be a tricky business.

The tide may also be turning when it comes to the economics of video 2.0, though. Recent debates have noted that none of the contributors to YouTube got any of the $1.65bn it received in stock from Google. There’s a certain amount of anger (read the comments) about that, which most of us can understand. YouTube is/was valuable because of its audience and its content. Does creating the mechanism for users to upload and find content created by their peers mean that the fruits of selling that mechanism should only go to its creators? I would suggest that the unpaid ‘crowdsourcing’ model for adding value to a network may already be reaching the end of its days.