When will the YouTube phenomenon slow down? Laws of math and physics suggest it has to some time, but it certainly wasn’t in April. YouTube shot up 2.4 points in market share, way faster than any of its competitors, to set a new record of 50.4% of all video viewing sessions on the web.

Meanwhile Yahoo!, MySpace and TimeWarner dipped slightly. Also, Veoh slid a bit in April, but continues to outperform with the second best year/year growth, after the YouTube juggernaut.

ManiaTV and Heavy saw modest gains in April. For these two independents, the upticks are good news, but maybe not good enough – both have seen major drops in traffic over the past 12 months.

Hulu still has a ways to go to catch up to older rivals, at least in terms of unique visitors at each domain. After the NBCU-Fox Joint Venture’s big debut in March, I expected the typical post- hype drop-off. While this happened to an extent, with unique video viewers contracting 12%, the site actually made up for lost viewers with better engagement, snagging a 5.6% increase in video viewing sessions and inching 0.1% in market share.

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