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The exponential growth of YouTube (GOOG) looks like it may be slowing down says a report by comScore Networks Inc. Even so, the Web site will continue to enjoy a strong No. 1 position in the field. The report added that when measuring the video-sharing site, it included both Google Video and YouTube together.

Bear Stearns analyst Lilian Y. Zhou said: "Given its huge user base at more than 150 million monthly visitors, the site has already reached critical mass and one would reasonably expect the exponential growth to decelerate as business scales."

This will continue to happen, although we need to consider that even with the decline, it still grew by over nine times the unique visitors it did last February. In January it was 13 times the amount of last year's January, while December had 20 times the unique visitors it did a year ago.

Growth is even seen as slowing more when you compare it with December of 2006 when the growth of page views was 63 times what it was they year before. Still, the site had 54.7 million unique viewers in January, and a total of 1.17 video streams were started.

If you want to see what all of this means, go read my 7-part series on portals and why they're still growing ad revenue. It talks about what always happens when an Internet property of any kind eventually reaches critical mass and what will happen afterwards.

While YouTube hasn't quite reached that point yet, it isn't too far away from that happening. What we see happening now will simply continue to happen. Growth will continue to decline - both in unique visitors and page views. Eventually you'll see both decline considerably when true critical mass has been reached.

People at that point will start to gravitate toward special-interest sites as they always have done through any medium.