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"More amazing YouTube stats: YouTube is now the world's fastest growing website, with traffic increasing by 75% last week.  According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the site grew from 7.3 million to 12.8 million unique visitors - what's more, traffic is up 297%  since January.  \nVisitors are also spending more time on the site and viewing many more pages: pageviews increased by more than 5 times over the same period, up from 11.8 million in January to 72.4 million in June.  Users now spend an average of 28 minutes (!) on the site - back in January, the average session was only 17 minutes.  This comes right after the news from Hitwise that YouTube is now serving 100 million videos per day.  The average YouTube user is male and aged 12-17.  \n\nSo why such massive growth?  One theory is that YouTube tapped into MySpace from early on with their video widgets.  With social sites, getting a few thousand key users from the start can lead to a huge snowball - it seems that the network effects kicked in early here.  There's also the fact that YouTube made the process super-easy, and chose to use Flash from the start - this ensured compatibility with most browsers.  \nThe social features are impressive too: YouTube realized that the creative class wants to interact with media, so they were sure to add commenting, groups, favorites, user ratings and all kinds of social filters to help you find the best stuff.  What's more, they continually add new features: if you've used the site in the last few days, you'll have seen that YouTube now prompts you to view related videos once the current one has finished - you can even hover over the video to skip to the next clip.  Clearly, this is a trick to make sure users stick around as long as possible.   \nIt's also great timing.  Internet video was all set to take off at the end of 2005 - faster connections, cheap webcams, users becoming familiar with generating their own content - and YouTube seems to be riding that wave.  However, stats have been released to suggest that MySpace Video may be growing even faster in terms of visits (the \"fastest growing\" site seems to refer to percentage growth).\nThis impressive growth is raising some questions about whether they can monetize all this traffic - obviously the NBC/YouTube deal was a step in the right direction, and they were also able to get a banner-ad deal with Disney for the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie.  I suspect they'll see some genuine success - whether through an acquisition or going it alone.  But if they don't, it'll be validation for those who think social media is an overinflated bubble.\n\nToday's Most Viewed Videos on YouTube\n\nAn entry for NBC's \"The Office\" Promo Campaign"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/07/22/youtube-is-worlds-fastest-growing-website/>