We all know Google reigns supreme when it comes to search (7.6 billion queries per month), but guess what the second most popular search engine now is? 

 

According to ComScore’s recent search engine rankings it’s YouTube. YouTube fetched over 2.6 billion search queries in the month of August, trumping Yahoo’s 2.4 billion. That’s a lot of people searching video and its popularity is set to further explode in the next few years.

Currently sites like YouTube and Hulu in the US account for 50% of all internet traffic and that’s predicated to rise to 80 percent by 2010,

AT&T’s VP Jim Cicconi raised serious concerns about the physical capacity of the internet at a recent Westerminister eForum “In three years’ time 20 typical households here in London will generate more traffic than the entire Internet did back in 1995.” Cicconi argued that the “unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic” currently flooding the tubes will increase to 50 times what it is now by 2015.

So who’s using all this bandwidth and what are they watching? Apparently 10% of people consume 80% of the available bandwidth, 0.5% swallow 40% of the bandwidth, and the rest of us, use less than 10%.

So when the other 90% of internet subscribers move away from their average daily 3.57 hours of television and discover youtube, what’s going to happen? Will we all be fighting for bandwidth to watch the content we want, when we want it or will we all agree to just watch what is popular? In the UK, with 60,375,106 views on YouTube that’s, Charlie bit my finger – again !, and the Leona Lewis – Bleeding Love video. L