ReadWriteWeb

Hitwise Intelligence took an interesting look at the breakdown of Yahoo's properties today. They come to the conclusion that, even if Yahoo sells off its search division, Yahoo's other properties probably wouldn't be too affected by this, as they get most of their traffic from Google's search anyway. Only Yahoo Image Search, Games, Maps, and News get most of their traffic from Yahoo Search.

YouTube's huge lead in market share over other online video sites continues to get bigger, even as the over all video viewing market continues a decline. According to traffic analysts Hitwise, YouTube now sees 75.43% of traffic to the online video category; that's up 26% from it's May 2007 marketshare of 59.95%. The nearest competitor is still MySpaceTV, which was down a whopping 44% to 9% marketshare. (Full chart of top 5 sites below.)

In April we reported that YouTube's dominance in online video was bigger than Google's dominance in search (67%). The new Hitwise numbers raise a number of questions for us.

According to web measurement firm Hitwise, MySpace commands 73.82% of all social networking traffic. The data comes from Hitwise's special social networking category, which tracks US traffic 57 leading social networks. MySpace took nearly 74% of all traffic to those sites in April, with Facebook second at 14.8% and MyYearBook third with 1.33%. Overall, social networking traffic is down 16% year-over-year.

Traffic analysts Hitwise released new numbers today indicating that while online video sites as a category have seen a 7% drop in traffic year over year since March 2007 - YouTube has seen a remarkable 32% growth in visits during that period. YouTube's market share in the video sector is now at 73.18%, Hitwise reports.

That's significantly higher than Google's all-time market share high-point among search engines. Google saw an all-time high 67% of searches performed in March, also according to Hitwise.

Alright, who are you people? The people who still use MapQuest. You know who you are... my question to you is, why? According to the latest numbers from Hitwise, Google Maps is making significant inroads against market leader MapQuest. MapQuest still commands over 50% of the market, but Google is clearly the number two online map provider now, having passed and distanced itself from Yahoo! earlier this year. Shouldn't Google have taken over the lead a long time ago? What's the hold up?