Market researcher Parks Associates conducted a new study concerning the online video platforms and the impact of online gaming over the users from every corner of the world. According to the research, 34 percent of the Internet users over 18-year-old played at least one online game while 29 percent of them connected to the online video sharing platforms.

Compared with last year, when only 19 percent of the users played games on the Internet, it shows quite an impressive increase. The online videos' audience was also improved with 16 points while the social networking sites grew up with 6 percent from 13 points to 19 points.

"Despite the growing popularity of YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook, gaming remains the king of online entertainment, driven largely by casual gaming activities," said James Kuai, a research analyst at Parks Associates. "Gaming also has business advantages. Unlike sites for social networking and video streaming, which rely solely on advertising revenue, casual gaming has more mature and heterogeneous revenue models, including web-based and in-game advertising, try-before-you-buy, subscriptions, and micro-transactions."

In the recent period, the online video sharing domain grew up a lot and this especially due to YouTube, a service which was improved very often. Since it was acquired by the Mountain View company Google in October 2006, YouTube received lots of new goodies such as new features and functions. And this research comes to support the idea that YouTube will continuously grow and who knows, maybe it will manage to beat the online gaming domain very soon.