The latest comScore stats for May 2006 show how
fast social networking sites are growing, but YouTube in particular is displaying spectacular
growth. As comScore noted in its monthly report:
"There seems to be no end in sight when it comes to the popularity of social networking sites. Myspace.com surpassed the 50 million unique visitor-mark in May, an increase of seven percent since April. In addition, Youtube nearly doubled its traffic in May, reaching 12.6 million visitors, while Classmates.com reached 14.7 million visitors, and Facebook.com captured just over 14 million visitors."
(emphasis mine)
According to comScore YouTube had 12.6 million unique visitors in May (up from 6.6M and so putting it just outside the top 50 properties on the Web), Google Video 7M, and Yahoo! Video 4.2M. YouTube was in fact the fifth most "Gaining Property" across all the sites comScore tracks, by percentage change in unique visitors, from April to May! Here's the trend chart, comparing YouTube's success with the far more static growth of Yahoo Videos and Google Videos:
Alexa.com shows a similar trend, but suspiciously their stats have YouTube with the same reach as MySpace (which obviously isn't right):
I'd be interested to see Hitwise's chart for May 06, because last time they did one (in December 05) they had Yahoo way out in front - but at that time YouTube was just starting it's big push:
So in the space of just 6 months YouTube has not only overtaken Yahoo Video as the most popular Web video-sharing service on the planet, but it's now approx 3 times as big as Yahoo's product! That just shows (once again) how quickly the status quo can change on the Web.
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I wrote a post like this on my blog a few days back... weird.
Posted by: Joe Anderson | June 27, 2006 11:52 PM
Cool, great minds think alike ay. I see you used Alexa stats for your post. Funny how Alexa shows the same trend as the comScore stats, except Alexa has YouTube = MySpace! That's not right...
Posted by: Richard MacManus | June 27, 2006 11:57 PM
good stuff Richard, interestingly I was inspired yesterday by an article from the financial times to write a post about youTube, I called it "youtube bigger than jesus" :-)
http://blog.experiencecurve.com/archives/youtube-bigger-than-jesus
The finanical times article was really interesting, the upshot being that the world wide CCO for Leo Burnett (one of the biggest ad agencies in the world) was touting the use of YouTube and saying that YouTube had more reach than MTV, check it out:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/bf054f88-01da-11db-a141-0000779e2340.html
Posted by: karl long | June 28, 2006 4:31 AM
Richard,
I have been posting charts regularly on the Hitwise blog - Here's a collection of my posts on video sites, as well as a press release we issued in May.
LeeAnn
Posted by: LeeAnn Prescott | June 28, 2006 6:48 AM
The discrepancy between Alexa and comScore is likely because of the way Alexa tracks web visits using their toolbar. If a user, who has the Alexa web toolbar installed, visits a site, Alexa records that as traffic.
Driving their viral growth is the fact that anyone can easily add YouTube's Flash video player to their own webpages. When the user views one of these embedded videos, streamed from YouTube, they are still on another site. It makes sense that Alexa is not counting those embedded video plays towards YouTube's total reach, while comScore does record the traffic.
Posted by: Alex | June 28, 2006 9:12 AM
For some reason a comment I left a two days ago hasn't shown up? There is a copy of it on cocomment just incase it got lost, should I repost?
http://www.cocomment.com/article/70234
Karl
Posted by: karl long | June 29, 2006 8:10 AM
Sorry Karl, your earlier comment was sitting there waiting for me to approve due to the links. done now.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | June 29, 2006 8:30 AM
for a non geek perspective:
I've yet to see a yahoo video and can't recall using any yahoo products apart from my sisters email address, for the videos I search for ( generally MMA or powerlifting ) most are youtube and some google. The google ones are more likely to be a home compilation, some of which are very polished. Youtube is the best place to search after a pay per view event.
Posted by: Paul MacManus | June 29, 2006 9:47 PM
On my blog, I show that Youtube's popularity as a TV show is actually between that of 'American Inventor' and '24'. Its barely top 20 among TV shows so is not going to take over the world just yet.
Posted by: mc1 | June 30, 2006 4:44 AM
my guess is a lot of the YouTube traffic is World Cup-related. that's the reason i've been hitting it several times a day - dozens, in fact - since the beginning of the tournament. now, with the off days in between quarters/semis/finals, i've been hitting it even more. woe to the football fan on non-game days.
Posted by: Peter | June 30, 2006 11:14 PM
Peter may be right about World Cup Soccer spiking YouTube traffic. I pretty much never use YouTube but have used it several times since the World Cup began in order to view soccer clips. Of course, Peter and I both offer only anecdotal evidence, so let's see if there's a traffic dip after the World Cup ends.
Posted by: Kal | July 3, 2006 2:51 AM
no wonder, they get decent traffic from http://popurls.com
Posted by: Rob | July 5, 2006 1:22 AM