Generally, growth for most web companies stalls during the summer months. People go on vacation, kids play outside, and overall Internet usage levels off.
This phenomenon did not hold true for YouTube, however, in the month of July. According to Compete.com, YouTube had its best month ever: 85.1 million U.S. visitors, up from 78.3 million. That's a growth rate of nearly 9% month-over-month. At the same time, Hulu, the Internet television website, saw its traffic drop by nearly 16%.
In addition, the site is now the 4th most visited site on the Internet, beating out Microsoft-owned Live.com and MSN for the first time.
The Graphs
YouTube's been on the rise, long after claiming the title of king of online video. It shot up at the beginning of 2009, but for the last few months, its growth looked to have stalled while Hulu's star was rising. But looking at this month's graph, YouTube's clearly once again surging:
This is in stark contrast to Hulu, which has been tanking for the last two months. We think the culprits are the slowing down of its ad campaign and the lack of TV content during the summer. No new shows = no new visitors:
Finally, YouTube jumped two spots on the website rankings, from 6 to 4. As a result, the Google-owned company trumped two Microsoft properties, MSN and Live.com. Of course, much of that traffic's been redirected to Bing, but it still says a lot about YouTube's massive reach: