• Last week, YouTube ranked 6th among all websites in the US and visitors spent an average of 25 minutes and 25 seconds with the website.
• YouTube ranked second behind Momo Mesh for websites that receive traffic from the search term ‘movies online’ for the 12 weeks ending January 16, 2010.
• Last week, among all of the search terms that drove traffic to YouTube, 2179 included the word ‘movie’ or ‘movies’, although 291 also included the word ‘free’.
• There are many competitors to the new service offering from YouTube including NetFlix, Apple and Amazon. However, in general, NetFlix has become synonymous with movie rentals online and appeared three times in the top ten search term variations of ‘movie rentals’ for the 12 weeks ending January 16, 2010.

These are early days and in the coming weeks we’ll also invite a small group of partners across other industries, in addition to independent film, to participate in this new option. Anything that brings more content to the YouTube community is a good thing. And making content available for rent will give our partners unprecedented control over the distribution of their work — they can decide the price of their videos and the rental duration; they can decide when and where their content is available; and they can keep 100% of their rights.