According to the Internet monitor Hitwise, the UK’s traffic to online video websites has roughly tripled in the last year. The organisation observed that UK visits to the top 25 online video sites had increased by 178 percent between February 2007 and February 2008. However, Robin Goad, the analyst who carried out this research, suggested that this figure is an underestimate and the total is actually closer to 200 percent.

Hitwise has created a “category” for study purposes, which includes the top 25 video websites as accessed by UK users. The study showed that Google’s YouTube is by far the most popular site in that category. Almost 70 percent of all UK visits to one of those top 25 video sites were made to either the UK or US version of YouTube. This customised category totals for 2.22 percent of all site visits made by UK web surfers in February. This represents an increase of 178 percent on the same month last year, in which those top 25 video sites accounted for 0.8 percent of all UK hits.

However, this study excludes a huge number of other parameters because of which the number 2.22 can be rounded to three directly.

Looking at this growth, other firms say that the rapid growth in online video use will drastically change the way in which ISPs price their services, with so-called “unlimited broadband” offers likely to disappear within a year.