MySpace has some claws and they want to sink them into YouTube. The question is, can the place for friends "broadcast itself" to a higher number of visitors than YouTube?

Since "most of their traffic comes from us," MySpace's COO said of YouTube in September, "we ought to be able to match them if not exceed them" with MySpace's own video tool. MySpace, for some reason, seems to think that they have contributed to the success of YouTube via linking them on their website. Those are boastful words, considering the fact that they are overlooking an important question. If YouTube receives major traffic from MySpace, how much does MySpace get from YouTube?

Since YouTube's inception and release to the public in July of 2005, its number of viewers has skyrocketed and is nearing the 50 million mark. MySpace has already reached the 50 million-viewer mark, but it has taken them over four years to reach that milestone. In fact, the growth trajectory of YouTube over MySpace is so quick that it outpaced MySpace in their early years in almost every aspect.

Take for example the number of visitors both sites had in the first 16 months of their existence. In it's first 16 months MySpace's number of visitors crept at a snail's pace to just 5 million. On the other hand YouTube's viewer number soared to 25 million in the same amount of time as MySpace.

MySpace would have the public believe that this boom in viewing activity on the part of YouTube, is because of the link referring YouTube on MySpace's homepage. But in a recent study, it was concluded that based strictly on volume both sites receive the same amount of referrals from each other's sites.

As a matter of fact, YouTube only receives 10% of its traffic from MySpace according to Compete, which conducted the study. Such a small percentage should hardly be considered "most of their traffic".

While 10% percentage is not a huge number, it is a contributing to the number of YouTube viewers and will most likely increase as time goes by. It is in both parties best interest to keep egos at bay and links referring both YouTube and MySpace viewers to each other's sites.

MySpace also offers a service similar to YouTube on its site, which allows users to contribute their videos for members of the community to view. However, it is clearly no competition to YouTube's site because of the fact that it's number of viewers seems to be in the express lane to becoming the fastest growing website ever. So for now, both sites can amicably refer the other until MySpace attempts to branch out and compete with YouTube.

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