YouTube’s Traffic Increases Like a Snowball

Those network effects are helping UTube outperform the growth of the overall market for online video, which itself is growing at a rapid clip. In September, Google sites accounted for 28.3 percent of all videos watched online, according to comScore. By November, Google’s share had grown by another 3 percentage points, to 31.3 percent, comScore said in a report Thursday. Google’s nearest rival, Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace, accounted for just 4.4 percent of the market.

During November, 138 million people, or about three-quarters of Internet users in the United States, watched on average 3 hours and 15 minutes of online video, or 45 minutes more than they watched in January. That’s still less than the amount of time average Americans spend in front of their TVs each day. But the data are likely to be skewed by the smaller number of people who watch online video “for absurd amounts of time,” said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Those that have been lost by TV are likely to be found on You Tube, where 74 million people watched 39 videos each on average in November, according to comScore.