Search engine traffic to online video increased by 16% year on year, primarily driven by interest in YouTube, which dominates 70% of the category.
A report from Hitwise says that while video has seen a big jump when comparing June 2008 to June 2007, it found that online traffic to the social networking industry fell by 10% during the same period.
Two categories, business/finance and news/media, fell by 5% when comparing June 2008 to June 2007, while travel and shopping/classified fell by 6%.
Search engines continue to be the primary way internet users navigate to key industry categories and Google search properties drive the majority of traffic, accounting for 87.8% of all Australian searches in the four weeks ending 28 June 2008, followed by MSN Search (6.7%) and Yahoo search (3.9%).
This is a big jump for Google, which sat at 78.5% in June 2007. The remaining 42 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.54% of Australian searches.
The survey was based on a sample of three million Australian internet users, as well as the latest search engine data from the US and Britain.
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