YouTube taking the world by storm

The craze of sharing videos online is growing at a rate of knots and leading the way is YouTube.com which has come from nowhere to be the web's fastest growing phenomenon in just six months.

Officially launched in late 2005, YouTube, which has raised $11m in venture capital, now enjoys an almost two-thirds market share (62.85 per cent) of the growing online video sharing market, according to internet traffic monitor Hitwise.

To put that into perspective, second place in the list is taken by Google Video with a 15.68 per cent market share.

Hitwise claims YouTube.com has now also broken into the top 50 websites in terms of site visits, as viral emails sweep the world linking to videos hosted on the service.

Along with sites such as Flickr and Wikipedia, YouTube.com is spearheading a user-generated content revolution which many established brands are now looking to tap into for site traffic and the potential to boost ad revenues.

The top 10 video sharing sites:
1. youtube.com 62.85 per cent
2. video.google.com 15.68 per cent
3. vids.myspace.com 8.60 per cent
4. metacafe.com 5.19 per cent
5. video.search.yahoo.com 4.01 per cent
6. veoh.com 1.24 per cent
7. dailymotion.com 1.06 per cent
8. grouper.com 0.60 per cent
9. filecow.com 0.38 per cent
10. yikers.com 0.38 per cent