The YouTube phenomenon now has stats to prove it. This video-sharing service has not only grown quickly, it has become the clear leader in the video space and is carving a niche as a new community service.

According to comScore, YouTube had 12.6 million unique visitors in May, almost double what it had the previous month and catapulting it in front of Yahoo Video as the most popular video service on the web. Additionally, YouTube is just outside being one of the top 50 web properties - in a very short span of time.

Below is a chart showing the growth trends for YouTube plotted with Yahoo Video and Google Video:

The web is definitely not a static market and explosive growth is taking place in the realm of community services such as YouTube. I expect that we've only just begun a major shift in the online landscape.

"There seems to be no end in sight when it comes to the popularity of social networking sites. Myspace.com surpassed the 50 million unique visitor-mark in May, an increase of seven percent since April. In addition, Youtube nearly doubled its traffic in May, reaching 12.6 million visitors, while Classmates.com reached 14.7 million visitors, and Facebook.com captured just over 14 million visitors."

I am an active YouTube community member. I post videos, search videos, embed them, and subscribe to many YouTube feeds. I have witnessed the popularity of YouTube as it hit with the right demographic, with the right services. YouTube is not just a place to share videos, it's an online community seeing the same devotion as one would expect to MTV or MySpace. People congregate there to share and talk, and blog posts containing YouTube videos are incredibly powerful tools for community building, and traffic generation, on blogs. I have been witness to this on my own websites.

The next shift I expect is the integration of video into other community services. Right now things are very disparate: writing, photos, video, music, podcasting, etc. Attempts have been made to combine these into community spaces, but the model has yet to hit off. I am very interested to see how this plays out in the next few months.

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