YouTube had its biggest ever month of traffic in July, accounting for 1 in every 35 UK Internet visits during the month.

The video site recorded its best ever performance in the Hitwise Social Networking and Forums category in July, in part due to strong growth of visits to YouTube from mobile devices. YouTube accounted for 22.54% of all visits to social networks in July, making it the fastest growing social network in the UK for the fifth consecutive month.

The growth of visits from mobile devices has really taken off in 2011. Since January UK Internet visits to YouTube mobile have doubled, and now 1 in 20 YouTube visits comes from a mobile device used on a home WiFi network, and that doesn’t take into account the millions of videos watched each month using the 3G networks.

Factoring in the visits from mobile devices using 3G connections, we estimate that smartphones and tablets account for something like 1 in 10 visits to YouTube, which is pretty phenomenal achievement considering the huge volume of videos watched on YouTube and the relatively short time that smartphones and tablets have been in mainstream use in the UK.
In the search market Microsoft Sites recovered from last month’s blip to reclaim the number two spot in the search engine rankings list. Microsoft Sites, led by the bing search engine, accounted for 3.84% of all UK Internet searches conducted in July 2011.

Yahoo! Sites increased their market share of visits slightly this month to account for 3% of all UK searches online and Ask Sites also made minor gains. However, it was only Microsoft Sites which demonstrated any notable growth in the search market this month and bing was the only search engine to increase its market share of searches year-on-year between July 2010 and July 2011.
You can see more about the latest search and social stats in our press release.
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