I have always found the amazingly-fast growth of YouTube amazing; in 6 months jumping, from 200 daily pageviews per million to a peak of over 4000 daily pageviews per million in the latter part of May. It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out this is a 2000% increase! The below graph, courtesy of Alexaholic, visualises this (I made it static, not the AJAX version).
YouTube is now the largest Web 2.0 site, with the exception of MySpace and the Wikipedia. It is much more well-known among the non-geek (and perhaps geek) than more conventional, and older, Web 2.0 sites like del.icio.us, Digg, and Flickr.
Pageview-wise, YouTube overtook Flickr in February, at around a pageviews per million of 600-800. From them, it has just gone up and up. It is now the 21st biggest site in the world. Reachwise, YouTube overtook Flickr in mid-January.
YouTube is getting extremely close to the Wikipedia now, and on pageviews it has already taken over it. Which site do I respect more? I would say the Wikipedia, but I’m fairly certain the majority of the public would find YouTube more amusing!
The Wikipedia has problems with copyright, but I doubt they are as bad as YouTube’s. YouTube is full of copyrighted material, and even Bill Gates admits to using YouTube to breach copyright! Somethings of these copyright problems on YouTube are major, like full TV shows, though some are stupid (like people dancing to copyrighted music!). The RIAA are taking advantage of YouTube to sue people for pointless things, like dancing to copyrighted music.
But the question is: will YouTube survive? Hypes come and go, and is YouTube a six month long hype? I personally think that unless it gets brought down by the MPAA (or RIAA :P), it will survive. The public love YouTube, geeks love YouTube, everyone loves YouTube. YouTube must handle terabytes of data a day, and if it keeps growing I doubt it’s advertising will subsidise the bandwidth. Most big sites can cope as they deal with text and/or images. Videos and audio is a different matter though.
So, why is YouTube so successful? It appeals to all audiences. With the re-launch of Digg possibly approaching, it will begin to appeal to the mainstream, though I think geeks will go off it. Digg is my favourite tech site, but I don’t want it mixed with celebrity gossip and such.
Naturally Alexa stats aren’t 100% accurate. Lots of users with Alexa are people riddled with spyware, and may not truly represent the population.
Tags: youtube, web2.0, web 2.0, hype, business, vc, digg, flickr, wikipedia, del.icio.us, alexa
someone turned me on to youtube, and at first glance, i thought it was dumb, but after i started surfing and watching… i was hooked.what’s the appeal?… i cant verbalize it, but it’s a mix of music and people being people.
Impressive.In a year I’ll overtake all of em!
While watching videos all day can be entertaining, I mostly feel I waste the day after I’m on Youtube for too long. That’s why my favorite web 2.0 site is Digg
With YouTube, anyone can just download a video and just upload it like a picture to YouTube. And, with YouTube working with other websites like MySpace, they use YouTube as a dumping ground for blog videos and other random stuff. Plus, in the United States, there are at least two or three TV shows that are dedicated to show nothing but “viral web videos” and most were found on YouTube. Of course, copyright issues will be the deathnail for YouTube, but I still wish that YouTube had a way to get rid of duplicate videos easily, since that can cut down on at least some of the bandwith.
Nice graphs - and informative article there..
I LOVE YouTube. I can spend hours on there watching videos of my favorite bands, clips from TV shows, silly stuff, etc etc.
I hope the MPAA/RIAA/FCC keeps their hands off YouTube. You would think they would enjoy the free promotion the site brings to their films, shows, artists, etc…but they tend to be very short-sighted. Fingers crossed they’ll let us enjoy it for a while though.
Of course the rumors have started to surface of an imminent s-1 filing and public offering. Which if you think of the value of popularity it makes sense. Supposedly Google had the option to buy MySpace 3 months before Rupert did at a 30% haircut on the purchase price but passed because “they could easily do it themselves.”
Now MySpace is shopping their search deal worth a purported half a billion dollars and the single largest search of queries outside of the google.com domain. That unlike all of us little guys who they don’t tell how much they pay out, they may pay as much of 90% of that direct to myspace.
So although an obvious business model has yet to exist with youtube, I say go for it.
Joe you look like you are as much of an alexaholic as I am, I do all of my alexa tracking on itsdEx and have massive watchlists of everything happening in Web 2.0 that I slice and dice with graphs; then buy and sell itsdEx shares based on what I think is going up. But the graphs couldn’t tell me how incredibly fast youtube has caught on as the tumbling techmeme of the year. Nice work Youtube.
[...] The future will see audio & video being streamed across in much the same way as television functions today. The ascendancy of tv over radio will be mirrored on the web as well (think YouTube times ZeFrank), and we know that podcasting refers to music only. So why don’t we set our sights higher at defining what will be the future of web broadcasts - video AND audio. [...]
[...] 這個包括創業家、創投、Google、教授學者、大家都不知道的大秘密就是：原來，影片可以是一種感染力特強的細菌！原來，分享影片這件事情，竟這麼有感染力！於是出現了「Viral Video」的詞彙。這裡有一個YouTube與Flickr的比較，可看見YouTube的pageview很快就超過相簿網站Flickr，雖然這件事也因為YouTube競爭者比Flickr少很多且Flickr大量使用AJAX技術可能降低其Pageview，但影片是「病毒之王」無庸置疑，而且「影片比相片還毒」、「影片比文字還毒」，總之影片是就是讓人很想去散播、去傳，它是一個心理病毒，透過人的滑鼠與鍵盤四處擴散。這個現象，就算哈佛大學的社會心理學家大概也不曾發現過。搞到最後，人們會因為某影片而認識YouTube，至今香港與中國大陸內地仍以「巴士阿叔的YouTube」來稱呼YouTube，當旗下次產品紛紛自己發揮自己的感染力，則原本母網站只會更成等比級數迅速發展，「Viral Video」以爆炸速度繼續蔓延。 [...]
i think youtube’s hype will die down in couple of years…. the site is crowded with useless stuff… it doesn’t have a clean feel to it… but facebook would be the next big thing until something else comes along.