YouTube Is Standing Tall

Google's(GOOG) YouTube division looks stronger than ever -- and its vitality has little to do with copyrighted video clips or amateur fads.

Rather than dropping as some has predicted, traffic numbers for YouTube continued to make steady strides after the video-sharing site was ordered by Viacom(VIA) to remove more than 100,000 copyrighted video clips.

According to the research firm Hitwise, YouTube's market share of U.S. Web visits to increased by 13.9% in the two-week period after Feb. 3, when YouTube was told to remove clips to popular Viacom-owned TV shows such as The Colbert Report and South Park.

And YouTube's average weekly traffic has now increased by 7% a week since the beginning of the year.

But perhaps even more importantly, most users arrived at YouTube without searching for popular Viacom program titles -- or titles owned by other major media players, for that matter. Instead of gradually tuning out of YouTube after Viacom yanked its content, it seems a growing number of users keep tuning in because of the short, high-quality and hard-to-find content the site offers.

Searches for popular TV content were nowhere near the top of the list of the biggest queries driving traffic to YouTube, Hitwise says. Searches for The Colbert Report and South Park were ranked in the thousands when it came to sending traffic to YouTube. And even the top copyrighted content search -- that for Thomas the Tank Engine -- ranked 102nd.