Sep 15 2007
Statistics about Online Video in the UK
Mike Rouse has been digging around for some stats about growth of online video in the UK.
As a half-time diversion from the rugby where Wales are making a pretty good fist of attempting to stuff a kangaroo (but may not quite make it), in contrast to the English turkey that was trussed up for Christmas by the South Africans the other day.
Anyway, these are the links I found after scouting around a bit in a few of my usual sources.
(Yes, this is the old “England appear to be cr*p, so we will support the Wales’ team” technique).
Sources for Online Video Statistics
Compete Blog
Lots of online video statistics at the Compete blog (link to category): non UK:
After a short summer vacation, Compete’s monthly ranking of the top online video sites is back- now with an improved methodology that reflects the latest industry trends. For starters, we peel back the label on several popular video sites to put them in a high-level competitive context. In addition to acknowledging Google’s ownership of YouTube, we credit Photobucket’s contribution to MySpace and chalk up growth over at StupidVideos to parent PureVideo Networks.
Hitwise UK Blog
Stats for August 2005 to July 2007 “Youtube” versus “funny videos” in the search engines at Heather Hopkins Hitwise UK blog:
We found a strong negative correlation between the weekly share of UK Internet searches for “youtube” and “funny videos” over the past two years. UK Internet searches for funny videos started to pick up just before YouTube developed much brand recognition in February and March 2006. Once YouTube started to take off, we saw a precipitous decline in UK internet searches for “funny videos” as illustrated in the chart below.
September 2006 statistics at Heather Hopkins Hitwise UK Blog, published on September 20th 2006.
Hitwise data shows that Market share of UK internet visits to the top 10 video sharing websites has increased 13-fold since the start of the year and has doubled in the past three months. YouTube is the dominant video sharing site, capturing 1 in every 400 UK internet visits and 2 in 3 of visits to the top 10 video sharing sites (week to 16th September 2006).
Visitors spent an average of 17 minutes and 32 seconds on YouTube last week and the site captured more than twice as large a share of UK visits than Google Video, the second ranked video sharing site, with 23% market share (combined UK and .com domains).
In the Guardian we have online video market share statistics Guardian, published on September 22nd. If you look carefully at the two entries you will see that this article is a simple plagiarisation (unless I have missed something) of Heather Hopkins blog entry - with no acknowledgement whatsoever. Smack bottom for “Ethical Man” Alan Rusbridger for letting his journalists steal other people’s content two years after his “ethical audit” cited above. I’ll follow this up and see what they say.
If they did that to me, they would be getting an invoice followed by a legal action, in accordance with the published terms and conditions of my blog.
Video sharing sites offered by Yahoo!, AOL and MSN each fail to take more than 2% of the UK market.
The report also shows that visitors spent an average of 17 minutes and 32 seconds on YouTube in the week ending September 16.
Similar statistics from June 2006, again from Heather at Hitwise UK:
In the UK, visits to YouTube overtook those to Google Videos in mid-February and last week accounted for 63% of visits to the top 10 video sharing sites. YouTube ranked at number 50 among the nearly 500,000 sites tracked by Hitwise last week and ranked 39 in terms of share of page views. Visitors spent an average of 15 minutes, 41 second on the site, which is about 6 and a half minutes longer than average for all categories of websites. YouTube’s market share of visits has more than tripled in the past three months and continues to rise rapidly, allowing it to maintain its lead over its nearest competitors.
The next largest video sharing site, Google Video Search, saw its market share of visits increase by 49% in the three month period, while MySpace Videos increased more than fourfold. Google Video Search and MySpace Videos held a 16% and 9% respective share of visits among the top 10 video sharing sites in the week ending 24th June 2006. MetaCafe ranked fourth with a 5% share of visits to the category.
The Economist
Various articles from the Economist, not gold dust but useful:
June 7 2007: The Impact of Online Video on network resources:
ISPs are particularly worried. P2P applications such as Joost are used by less than 5% of a typical ISP’s subscriber base, but they account for over half the total traffic. Comcast, an American cable operator, has been criticised for cutting off intensive P2P-using “bandwidth hogs”, even though it refuses to specify exactly what it regards as acceptable usage limits.
August 30th 2007: Use of online media is being lead by children in the UK, and the implications:
“Children are going from being media agnostic to media junkies in a very short period of time, and the early teen years is when that is changing,” says James Thickett, director of research at Ofcom. Britain is leading trends, rather than following them, he adds. Strikingly, 7% of ten-year-olds have a webcam, so their experience of the online world is video-based rather than simply typing at a keyboard; among children aged 13 to 15, the number jumps to 15%. One reason is the proliferation of fast internet connections. Half of British households had broadband by the end of 2006, up from one in ten in late 2003.”
June 25 2007, perhaps of interest to readers of this blog: Youtube as a tool for political campaigning. US-focussed.
Times have already changed since the 2004 presidential election. In that year, bloggers wrote about the presidential debates in real-time. In 2008, voters will be able, through YouTube, to send in video-recorded questions to the debate’s moderators. Last time around campaigns introduced stodgy blogs, written by lowly campaign workers, touting their man’s latest speech here or there. This time, well-known bloggers are being brought into campaigns.
Tags: online video, online video resources, joost, the economist, alan rusbridger, video, use of video, funny video, youtube[tags]online video, online video resources, joost, the economist, alan rusbridger, video, use of video, funny video, youtube[/tags]