• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, April 5, 2007

As major media companies continue to battle with YouTube, evidence is mounting that the video-sharing site is winning the fight for users' time -- with or without copyrighted clips.

Online video metrics company Vidmeter Wednesday issued a report concluding that copyrighted clips accounted for a small proportion of the most viewed videos on the site. For the study, Vidmeter looked at 6,725 of the most popular clips on the site between December and March -- the same time period when Viacom, News Corp and others publicly complained about copyright violations on the site.

The clips examined by Vidmeter garnered a total of around 1.59 billion views in that three-month time period. Just 621 of those clips, or less than 10%, were removed during that time for copyright violations; those expunged clips accounted for around 94 million views, or 6% of the total.

The report also found that music videos were the most-viewed clips taken down at Viacom's request, with Panic! At the Disco's "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" topping the list. Time Warner, NBC, BBC, Sony, Disney and News Corp also were among the companies that asked YouTube to take down clips during that time.

Viacom is disputing the study's results and methodology. A Viacom executive argued to Reuters that YouTube still hosts copyrighted clips, and that the ones purged at Viacom's request represent only a portion of all of the Viacom-owned material actually available on the site.

Still, the Vidmeter finding appears consistent with early reports out of measurement company Hitwise. In late February, Hitwise reported that YouTube traffic increased in the two weeks after Viacom's Feb. 2 demand that YouTube purge clips. The week ending Feb. 17, YouTube accounted for .6031% of U.S. Web traffic, while all the TV networks' combined sites garnered just .4865%, according to Hitwise.