However, Facebook has lost substantial ground since the previous December, when it took a 58.5pc share of the UK’s social networking market, according to data from Experian Hitwise.

It slipped 1.3 percentage points last month alone.

The decline has raised concerns that Facebook is running out of steam in the markets where it is best established, whilst its competitors gain ground.

“Facebook’s growth is levelling out,” said James Murray, market research analyst at Experian. “Because Facebook had such a clear lead, it was always going to be difficult for Facebook to maintain [its position]. It has probably reached near enough its maximum growth.”

The figures will come as a blow to the company, which has been investing heavily in extending its reach and enticing users to click on its adverts, ahead of its long-awaited IPO. Facebook is expected to float with a possible valuation of  £65 billion ($100 billion)- the biggest technology IPO ever.

By contrast, YouTube, the user-generated video site owned by Google, grew its traffic by 45pc last year.

It accounted for just over a quarter of all UK visits to social networks in December, putting it 7.4 percentage points ahead of the previous year.

“We’re expecting video to be even more influential as a marketing channel, and marketers will have to adapt their strategies to incorporate a multi-channel approach in order to secure customers both on and offline,” said Mr Murray.

Twitter and Yahoo! Answers also made gains, but remained tiny by comparison, with 3pc and 2pc of all visits to social networks respectively.

Google’s social network, Google +, did not register in the top 10 most visited social networks at all.

However, Google grew its share of search engine usage market in the UK, edging up from a 91.3pc share of the market to 91.8pc.

Microsoft, its nearest competitor, was a minnow by comparison. Its suite of sites accountted for 3.6pc of all search engine visits in the UK in December, whilst Yahoo!’s popularity for searches fell nearly a percentage point to 2.5pc.

Yahoo came third with about 130 million visitors each month.

But analysts warned Yahoo’s tally might be at risk if young people continued to turn away from web-based email.

The study is based on data collected between January and October and included visits from home and work computers. It involved a sample from a global panel of 200,000 people.

Website                                  Unique visitors per month
1. Google                                        153,441,000
2. Facebook                                     137,644,000
3. Yahoo                                         130,121,000
4. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing                 115,890,000
5. YouTube                                     106,692,000
6. Microsoft                                      83,691,000
7. AOL Media Network                        74,633,000
8. Wikipedia                                      62,097,000
9. Apple                                           61,608,000
10. Ask Search Network                     60,552,000

Source: Nielsen

Although Google trumped Facebook as the most popular web brand, the search giant’s Google+ network came far behind Mark Zuckerberg’s site in Nielsen’s ranking of the most popular social networks and blogs.

Google+ came eighth in the list with 8.02m unique monthly visitors.

That also put it behind Google’s weblog publishing tool Blogger, as well as Twitter, Wordspace, Myspace, Linkedin and Tumblr.

Google’s YouTube was identified as the most popular destination for online videos, attracting more than three times the number of monthly visitors as the music video service Vevo.

While Yahoo maintained its position as one of the top three web brands, an earlier study cast doubt over its ability to retain the position over coming years as it’s email system faces a declining market share.

Visits to video sharing websites by UK users have gone up by more than a third in the last year.

The figures, from internet research company Experian Hitwise, show YouTube accounts for nearly 70% of all video website hits.

It’s now the third most popular site in the UK after Google and Facebook.

Lady Gaga was the most in demand for artist within music searches.

The research was gathered between September 2010 and September 2011.

During that time 240 million hours every month were spent by British internet users watching videos online.

UK’s top 10 websites:

Google UK
Facebook
YouTube
eBay UK
Windows Live Mail
MSN UK
Google.com
BBC News
BBC Homepage
Yahoo! UK & Ireland

Research by Experian Hitwise

Illustrating its dominance in this area, Google owned YouTube, clocked up 184 million of those hours.

That number is still dwarfed by the amount of time spent on social networking sites though.

The same research shows 800 million hours were spent each month on sites like Facebook and Twitter by the UK’s internet users.

Despite YouTube’s dominance of video sharing websites there was also strong growth for other ones too.

BBC iPlayer, the second most popular video site, experienced a 22% rise in traffic last year.

That means the number of visits to the site has doubled in the last three years.

Meanwhile, online video has become a career for thousands of video creators, with some making hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

As online video viewership has grown – YouTube draws 500 million unique visitors each month – marketers hope to take advantage of the dedicated audiences and low barriers to entry.

Video creators in turn are making money from hosting sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion and Blip.tv, which share a portion of the profits derived from video and banner advertisements.

YouTube, for one, has distributed millions of dollars in advertising revenue to its 20,000 most popular amateur producers since 2007.

A still from an episode of Annoying Orange on Blip.tv Blip.tv, which hosts the Annoying Orange comedy show describes its content as “the best in original web series”

“We share millions of dollars with our partners every year,” said Tom Sly, the site’s head of strategic partner development.

The amount advertisers pay varies with the popularity and quality of the videos, with creators receiving as much as $20 (£12.70) per thousand views.

“Across the board we’re seeing those numbers increase as we see higher quality content and the ability to target users so that advertisers have more fine-grained control,” Mr Sly said.

In 2010, the number of YouTube partners making over $1,000 (£600) per month from advertising revenue went up 300%, the company said.

The company declined to release specific figures, but Mr Sly said “hundreds” of video creators make more than $100,000 a year and “thousands” make more than $10,000 a year.

The top performing web shows on Blip.tv are on target to take in more than $1m in advert revenue each, said Eric Mortensen, senior director of programming.

“There are certain class of people, and it’s not that they are rejecting TV, they never even thought to be like TV in the first place,” he said. “And because of that they are doing new and different things and that’s how they end up making money.”

Industry analysts say that online video audiences are loyal and attentive and feel a connection to the creators.

In addition to advert revenue sharing, some video creators make as much as $150,000 a year by cutting sponsorship deals with major companies, said former YouTube executive George Strompolos, founder of Fullscreen, a start-up that aims to facilitate connections between corporate sponsors and video creators.

Aware of the power of recommendations from such seemingly personal relationships, companies like Ford, GE, and Lancome are directly reaching out to video makers to hawk their products.

Online video creators work without the need for teams of agents, managers, markets and developers, Mr Strompolos said.

“Online video tends to be a one-stop shop solution,” Mr Strompolos said.  “You get not only the creative development and the authenticity of voice you’re looking for, but you also get distribution and reach.”

As the online video advertising and merchandising infrastructures become more sophisticated, analysts say more and more people are likely to strike out on their own in web video.

This is becoming the new television- a place where the average person has a much better chance of getting noticed and making money than if they were to go the traditional route via Hollywood.

Alan Lastufka, author of YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts, said: “The money may not always be headline-worthy, but it’s enough to quit your day job, stay in the basement on your computer and spend your time connecting with fans.”

The overall result is that traffic to both YouTube and Twitter has increased whilst Facebook’s dominance of social media has declined.

This month’s search and social analysis release confirmed some interesting trends in the Social Networking and Forums category, including a bumper month of traffic for Twitter, continuing growth for YouTube and a declining market share for Facebook.

Last month Hitwise noted the growth of YouTube and how the video website now accounts for 1 in every 5 visits to all social networking sites. In May YouTube continued its growth, accounting for 20.52% of all visits to the Social Networks and Forums category.

Meanwhile Twitter had its biggest month of traffic ever, in part because of the super-injunction revelations, but also because the micro-blogging platform has carved a niche for itself as an excellent platform through which Internet users can share and consume news.

Recent examples like the death of Osama Bin Laden, the Egypt crisis and the resurgence of the ash cloud have all been shared and discussed on Twitter.

What’s interesting is that the growth of YouTube and Twitter is coming at the expense of Facebook.

Since the beginning of 2011, Facebook’s market share of visits within the Social Networks and Forums category has fallen from nearly 58% to hover around the 54% mark.

Despite the drop in market share in recent months, Facebook needn’t panic. Although its market share is declining slightly, Facebook still commands over half of the visits to the fastest growing category online, and having a slightly smaller proportion of an ever increasing pie is still a very healthy place to be.

However, it does raise the question: has Facebook now finished its growth phase in the UK? This is something that Dr Search will continue to monitor closely over the coming months and confirms our blog post of a couple of days ago when I posted: Facebook faces saturation claims as growth stops

Google is still very much the dominant player in UK search, with Google Sites accounting for over 90% of all searches conducted by UK Internet users.

However, between February and March 2011, Google Sites lost 0.66% market share of searches, whilst Microsoft Sites increased their market share of searches by 0.28%.The growth of Microsoft sites, led by Bing, is more pronounced in the year-on-year figures.

Between March 2010 and March 2011 Bing was the only search engine to increase its volume of searches from UK Internet users.

Whilst Google, Yahoo!, Ask and other search providers all dipped in year-on-year change, Microsoft Sites improved their market share of searches by 1.43%.

This latest insight from Experian Hitwise underlines why it is important for brands to ensure they do not solely optimise content around Google at the expense of other search engines. Bing, Yahoo! and Ask each appeal to particular audiences and often send more of their traffic to key transactional industries such as retail, travel and finance.

“Microsoft is starting to make inroads into Google’s massive share of the search market, although Google remains the clear leader in absolute volume terms,” commented Experian Hitwise’s Research Director, Robin Goad. “It is vital that brands closely monitor the changing trends in the search market, as search typically accounts for between 40-50% of a website’s inbound traffic.”

As for social media- YouTube is the fastest growing social network in March 2011.

Facebook continued its dominance in the Experian Hitwise Social Networks and Forums category, accounting for over 56% of all visits to social networks from UK Internet users in March 2011.

However, Facebook’s market share of visits declined in March compared to February by 1.22%, mostly driven by increased visits to YouTube.

The UK’s most popular online video site accounted for 19.06% of all visits to social networks in March, up from 18.32% in February, making YouTube the fastest growing social network of March.

Year-on-year, the fastest growing social network was Facebook, increasing its market share of visits by 4.16% between March 2010 and March 2011. Despite Facebook’s slight drop in market share of visits in March 2011, the social behemoth is still attracting new visitors to its website every single day.

In the last three years Facebook has more than doubled its market share of visits to the Social Networks and Forums category, growing from 22% in March 2008 to 56% today.

Robin Goad commented: “The growth of Facebook is immense, and it is such an integral part of the online scene now that we would expect it to achieve a 60% market share of social visits at some point in 2011. Many companies are still apprehensive when it comes to exploiting social networks to promote their brand, but with such a huge online following, social networks are ignored at a marketer’s peril.  Facebook is now the second single biggest source of traffic to all websites after Google. As a result, it is becoming increasingly important that brands derive maximum benefit from this social network.”

The research is published by Hitwise at: http://www.hitwise.com/bing-the-fastest-growing-search-engine-in-the-uk/

The flaw gives sites access to all the other sites that user has visited. Many use it to target ads or see if users are patronising rivals.

The researchers documented JavaScript code secretly collecting browsing histories of Web users through “history sniffing” and sending that information across the network.

While history sniffing and its potential implications for privacy violation have been discussed and demonstrated, the new work provides the first empirical analysis of history sniffing on the real Web.

“Nobody knew if anyone on the Internet was using history sniffing to get at users’ private browsing history. What we were able to show is that the answer is yes,” said UC San Diego computer science professor Hovav Shacham.

The researchers said their work showed a need for better defences against history tracking.

The bug exploits the way that many browsers handle links people have visited. Many change the colour of the text to reflect that earlier visit.

This can be abused with a specially written chunk of code sitting on a website that interrogates a visitors browser to see what it does to a given list of websites. Any displayed in a different colour are judged to be those a user has already seen.

A survey of 50,000 of the web’s most visited websites by the team from UC San Diego found 485 sites using this method to get at browser histories, 63 were copying the data it reveals and 46 were found to be “hijacking” a user’s history.

The most popular site that uses the technique is adult site YouPorn. Many other porn sites use it too as well as sports, news, movies and finance websites.

The researchers also looked at other popular techniques that sites use to map and monitor what visitors do.

Some, such as YouTube, run scripts that track the trail a user’s mouse pointer takes on and across pages.

“Our study shows that popular Web 2.0 applications like mashups, aggregators, and sophisticated ad targeting are rife with different kinds of privacy-violating flows,” wrote the researchers.

The researchers pointed out that some modern browsers, such as Chrome and Safari, are not vulnerable to history hijacking and that the most recent version of Mozilla has closed the loophole.

Users of Internet Explorer can defeat the bug by turning on “private browsing”.

Users can also check how much information they are leaking by visiting a webpage set up by security researchers that tries to grab their history.

Despite these safeguards, the researchers said there was a “pressing need to devise flexible, precise and efficient defenses” against the history hijacking technique.

The research team is now planning more in-depth work that it hopes will result in tools that will more comprehensively defend against attempts to exploit the bug.

Just eight months ago in March YouTube announced that 24 hours of video were being uploaded per hour. The YouTube official blog post announcing this record also comes out with some interesting statistics.

As you can see from the above chart, the number of uploads to YouTube have more than doubled in the last two years. How come? Here are some of the factors contributing to the growth:

* The time limit for videos uploaded by users increased by 50% from 10 to 15 minutes.
* The upload file size increased over the last few years by more than 10x to 2GB via our standard uploader.
* Mobile phones have improved dramatically in how quickly and easily they upload videos to YouTube.
* More companies integrating our APIs to support upload from outside of YouTube.com (Activision’s Call of Duty Black Ops. as one very cool example where you can record and share video footage from within the game).

“If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week.  Another way to think about it is: if three of the major US networks were broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the last 60 years, they still wouldn’t have broadcast as much content as is uploaded to YouTube every 30 days.”

With 35 hours of video being uploaded each minute, it’s becoming more and more clear that you can watch basically anything on YouTube. Which is why Google owned YouTube has such trouble deleting off Al Qaeda incitement to terrorism videos.

Dr Search reminds you that YouTube is a great, free channel for you and your business to promote your services- with a rapidly growing audience.

While the death of personal privacy had been predicted for a long time, rapid technological changes posed a mortal danger to it, he said.

The difference now, he said, was that the falling cost of storage and processing power made it far easier to keep data such as email conversations, Tweets or postings to a social network page than it was to spend the time managing and deleting the information.

The migration of human social interaction from ephemeral forms that took place face to face into data that never goes away and does not allow us to forget or leave behind our past actions was undoubtedly going to change society, he said.

As lives are lived more and more online or via the phone it has led, said Mr Schneier, to a situation in which everyone has to be the guardian of their own privacy policy.

Deciding what data we are prepared to surrender would be fine if people were given a proper choice, he said.

Unfortunately, he said, users of social networking sites or any online service were being presented with choices defined by priorities they did not choose.

The choices are filtered through the law, which is being outstripped by technological change, leaving people with only what net firms give them or can get away with.

“The social rules are being set by businesses with a profit motive,” he said.

Facebook has faced a barrage of criticism about its privacy settings and despite effort to address user concerns, has continued to worry privacy campaigners.

Google boss Eric Schmidt said, after the row about its StreetView service scooping up wi-fi data: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Talking about privacy policies on web sites, Mr Schneier said they were hard to find and understand because it was in the interest of those sites to confuse people into disclosing more than they were comfortable with.
Natural by-product

The more data about their members that sites gathered the better they can serve advertisers or use the data for their own marketing purposes, he said.

“We are now seeing the death of privacy,” he said. “Those CEOs are doing it and doing things to hasten its demise.”

In some senses, he said, this was not their fault because the production of data was a natural by-product of the way that computers work.

But, he said, this did not mean that legal and technological protections were not needed. The law was currently abdicating its role and there was a pressing need for tools that could help people manage their online presences.

He said that how we deal with privacy now would define how future generations regard us in the same way that commentators now look critically on the pollution produced as a by-product of the industrial revolution.

The decision has ramifications around Europe and follows a similar win in the US in the summer.

Sources at Google- which owns YouTube said the ruling meant other high profile companies like Facebook, and internet providers BT and Virgin Media, could breathe a sigh of relief.

Telecinco brought its action against YouTube in 2008, saying the website should be held liable when users uploaded clips of TV shows that infringed its intellectual property rights.

YouTube argued that more than 24 hours of video were loaded on to its website every minute and it was unable to monitor everything for potential copyright breaches.

The court, in effect reinforcing the Europe wide E-Commerce Directive, agreed and pointed out that YouTube already offered a system that enabled companies such as Telecinco to identify and report uploaded material that infringed their copyright.

In a statement after the verdict, a spokesman for YouTube said: “This decision reaffirms European law which recognises that content owners, not service providers like YouTube, are in the best position to know whether a specific work is authorised to be on an internet hosting service.

“If internet sites had to screen all videos, photos and text before allowing them on a website, many popular sites – not just YouTube but Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others – would grind to a halt.”

In June, Viacom’s claim for $1bn damages over alleged copyright abuses was dismissed by a New York judge under US “safe harbour” rules.