Hitwise reveals tripling of UK traffic to online video sites

Hitwise, the online competitive intelligence service, recorded a 178 per cent increase in UK traffic to online video Web sites, between February 2007 and February 2008.

However Hitwise analyst, Robin Goad, who carried out the research, believes that this is a conservative estimate, and the real increase could be closer to 200 per cent.

For the purposes of the research, Hitwise created a category which includes the 25 video Web sites most popular with UK surfers.

YouTube tops the category - in February 2008 it accounted for almost 70% of the visits to all the sites in the category.

The custom category accounted for 2.22 per cent of all site visits made by UK Web surfers in February 2008 - an increase of 178 per cent compared with February 2007. The sites in this category accounted for 0.8 per cent of all UK hits during the month.

Goad believes that the numbers underestimate the actual growth in traffic, because the custom category does not include a huge number of smaller Web sites that also offer video streaming.

He believes that traffic to these smaller sites has probably grown even more than to the sites in the custom category.

Hitwise’s figures also do not include non-browser-based video streaming, from services such as Channel 4’s 4oD standalone player, and represent page hits rather than the amount of data streamed. These factors could also affect the accuracy of the figures.