YouTube Is Standing Tall

And even that clip, which is more entertaining and coherent than the uploads of most self-indulgent, camera-wielding users, has turned out to be the work of a trained actress with a crew.

Unique content with a decent amount of production quality that is explicitly geared towards short lengths seems to be the big driver of traffic to YouTube, at least as far as searches are concerned. "The viral nature of some of these clips, the discussion that is generated about them on social networking sites, and the short length of the clips -- which seems to still be the sweet spot on the Internet -- gets a lot of people searching for them," says Bill Tancer, general manager of global research for Hitwise.

Tancer says that audiences may not yet be willing to watch longer, television-style video on the Internet. This may be especially true given the spread of digital video recorders, which allow viewers to record and revisit television programming easily, as well as YouTube's trend toward attracting older viewers.

Older viewers may be less used to watching television content over the Internet than younger viewers and, therefore, more likely to turn to YouTube for short content that they can't find elsewhere. A year ago, 59.7% of YouTube viewers were under the age of 34, compared with 43.8% now -- a drop of nearly 16%, according to Hitwise's data.