Thanks to the ease of file sharing, media companies have been battling piracy to protect content like music, movies, and TV shows online. Last year, Hulu was launched by NBC Universal, News Corp., and The Walt Disney Co. as one of the first initiatives to offer a broad selection of content online and monetize the content through advertising revenue. Looking back, 4 weeks after the launch during the week of April 5, 2008, the website captured 0.0028% of visits and ranked 2479th among all websites. Now Hulu has grown in popularity and ranked 66th among all websites for US Internet visits last week.
Last month, Universal Music Group and Sony Music launched a new website called Vevo for visitors to watch music videos online. For Vevo, 4 weeks after the launch on December 8, 2009, the website has captured 0.0054% of visits and ranked 1275th among all websites for the week ending Jan. 2, 2010. Among all websites in the Music category, Vevo ranked 22nd last week.

Vevo has a powerful partner helping to drive traffic – YouTube. Last week, YouTube referred the highest share of traffic to Vevo and represented 80.64% of the upstream traffic. Of those visitors, 83.60% were new visitors to the website (have not visited in the past 30 days) compared with the 2nd ranked upstream referral website, Google, where 46.29% were new visitors. With Google however, the share of returning visitors can be viewed as positive & may displa a shift in behavior for some searchers starting to build a direct relationship with Vevo as a destination.

Wikipedia and YouTube still remain major destinations for searchers seeking music content and received 16.65% and 8.01% of the clicks from a portfolio of 900 music artist names last week. However, the relationship with YouTube is likely to continue to help increase traffic to Vevo.