The beginning of this Reuters article attempts to make it look like YouTube is demolishing its competition in people viewing videos on its site.
The opening statement saying that after having media companies tell them they must pull their copyrighted videos off their sites, the company has exploded in market share, which is larger than the next 64 video-sharing sites combined, leaves out a big part of the picture.
The writer quotes a Hitwise survey that is only talking about hits to the site, not videos viewed. At the end of the story the writer does make a feeble statement 
saying the survey by Hitwise doesn't measure whether the visitors to the site actually watch videos, which in fact increasingly large amounts of visitors don't.
The reason this is being presented in this way is because MySpace has made huge strides in the American market for those that actually spend time watching videos when they get to the site. In that actual important number, MySpace has been quietly growing faster than YouTube.
According to comScore, MySpace received 50.2 million people viewing video in April, while YouTube had 57.9 million. MySpace, they noted, is also growing at a faster pace than YouTube domestically. If this continues it won't take long for MySpace to catch them in the U.S. market.
The reason why all of this is important is YouTube has stated that it plans on staying primarily in the user-generated video business, while MySpace is more committed to professionally produced video, which is proving to be by far the best way to monetize. It exposes the weakness of the YouTube model.
When you're talking about hits to a video site, you can see the meaninglessness of the data when it swamps their rivals yet doesn't produce near the percentages of video views.
Think of YouTube receiving more hits than their next 64 competitors, yet it is growing slower than MySpace in those that are viewing their videos. This is more important than it first looks. It's a disaster for YouTube. They're trying to hide it by referring to hits instead of views, but that's not going to fool many people for too long. A hit on a video site without a view means a visitor is saying goodbye fast.
For YouTube it's also saying that people are gravitating to higher quality videos, rather than the amateur, repetitious stuff that looks like it's starting to get really old to people. It seems people are visiting the site but not finding much they want to look at. Not a good sign.
The bottom line of this story is it's an attempt to make it look like YouTube hasn't been affected by the pulling of a lot of professional content from their site, when in reality they have.
All this reveals is that hits on a video site aren't too relevant. It's in how many of those hits are watching vidoes that matter. In this area in the U.S., MySpace is growing much faster.
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