Since its launch, YouTube has sparked a revival of sorts with several thousands of users signing up for the service and in turn generating content, which are gobbled up by the masses. YouTube recently announced that its viewers were "now watching more than 100 million videos per day on its site,” and this announcement has sparked heaps of praise onto the young web 2.0 startup. Internet traffic monitor Hitwise also stated that YouTube is the leading net video download site in the US, with 29% of the country's multimedia market.

The Hitwise report also listed other players in the US multimedia entertainment market. News Corp’s MySpace has only a 19 percent share of the market which is a distant second compared to YouTube’s 29 percent share! Then the folks who are really lagging behind in the online video race are Yahoo, MSN, Google and AOL who only have 3-5 percent of the video search market.

For now, it seems like YouTube has firmly established its presence and has large following. The question is, will the folks at YouTube be able to maintain this lead against their competitors? How are they going to address issues of copyright content being uploaded onto their site? All these questions seem unanswered.

Another important aspect to this whole game is the issue of a revenue model. The company says that it is "still working" on developing advertising and other revenue generating services to support the business.

Everyone wants to be a part of the "YouTube culture", but within another quarter will YouTube be a culture or just another fad? With the way things are going for YouTube, I certainly see it growing into something bigger and better. There’s a lot of space for growth, but I think the folks at YouTube have a clear sense of direction if they have come this far.