WebProNews

Video sites have been ground into the grooves of YouTube's virtual tires on the information superhighway, in terms of online traffic. A 60 percent market share that is 50 percent greater than the next 64 video sites combined makes for a dominant position in the online video industry.

That's where Hitwise research director LeeAnn Prescott places YouTube, Google's $1.65 billion video acquisition.

Said Prescott:

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).

Those 64 other video sites, in a custom category measuring US visits, grew by only 8 percent during the same period.

MySpace videos picked up 16 percent market share, good enough for second behind YouTube. Google, Yahoo, and MSN Video rounded out the top five, respectively.

Much of the traffic arriving on YouTube and other video sites comes from search engines. Prescott said about 20 percent of their traffic starts at a search engine result. "Clearly, optimizing your videos for search is just as important as getting your videos up on the web," said Prescott.