(AP) Nearly half of Americans who use the Internet have used a video-sharing site such as YouTube, and daily traffic to watch or post video doubled last year, a new survey finds.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 48 percent of Internet users have visited such a video-sharing site at least once to watch or post video, a growth from 33 percent in December 2006. On a typical day, 15 percent of users watch or post a video, up from 8 percent a year ago.

Lee Rainie, the Pew project's director, attributed the growth to a rising number of people making more video clips available and telling more friends about them. Whole new groups are posting video for sharing, such as professors who post footage of themselves teaching or conducting experiments.

Rainie was surprised usage wasn't higher.

"Some people are still quite comfortable with the traditional online experiences and like the stuff they do online," he said. "They think of the video experience as the things they do on other hardware" - like a TV.

Among other findings, Pew said men are more likely than women to have used a video-sharing site - 53 percent compared with 43 percent. And 70 percent of adults under age 30 have done so, compared with only 16 percent of those 65 and older.

About a quarter of Americans have recorded video - roughly the same as in early 2006 - but about three times as many of those users are posting video, 14 percent compared with 4 percent in 2006.

The phone survey of 2,054 adults, including 1,359 Internet users who were asked about video sharing, was conducted Oct. 24 to Dec. 2. Most of the questions had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The survey included random calls made to cell phones to reach youths and tech-heavy adults who do not have traditional phones.

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