Wednesday, Jun 4, 2008    Text size: 

Although there are dozens of video-sharing sites — so-called "tube" sites — only two have emerged from the pack with traffic large enough to garner some mainstream tech press at Silicon Alley Insider, a major technical blog that declared YouPorn the "YouTube of porn."

A survey of the major website-ranking services backs up Silicon Alley's appraisal. Alexa ranks YouPorn.com at 33, with RedTube.com at 48 and XTube.com at 197.

Compete.com offers similar results, with YouPorn.com opening a more dramatic lead. Quantcast.com returns similar results.

But unlike the mainstream video-sharing industry, where YouTube emerged quickly as the chief innovator and clear winner, tube sites in the adult industry garner loads of traffic in a struggle for supremacy that isn't quite over.

YouPorn.com's traffic has jumped about 1,300 percent from last year, attracting 3.2 million unique visitors in the U.S., but despite those impressive numbers, RedTube.com's traffic is on the rise, too.

Other tube sites have claimed impressive numbers, but even though YouPorn.com and RedTube.com have so far emerged from the pack, Silicon Alley neglected another major player in the tube-site wars: XVideos.com, which has jumped to a top-200 Alexa ranking and is slowly gaining on YouPorn.com on the Compete charts.

Although the race for tube-site supremacy may be interesting, the ubiquity of free content online remains a headache for webmasters and producers, including All Media Play's Jeff Mullen.

"We really need to take [content theft] seriously," Mullen told XBIZ. "Everyone thinks 2257 is the biggest problem, but we need to stop the outright theft that's going on."