Om has posted today about the growth of online video services, and the issues involved in copyrighted materials ending up on these.
The impressive growth in YouTube’s traffic prompted me to check its traffic against popular photosharing services such as flickr, WebShots, SnapFish,… and they all have been overtaken (or are about to) by YouTube. Of course, this analysis is based on Alexa rankings and as such is a public proxy of actual numbers, but this shows that online video is growing – fast.
Checking others, YouTube seems to be – by far – the largest video sharing services reviewed by TechCrunch a couple of months ago. YouTube announced a $3.5M investment from Sequoia last November – check out the growth since then. Feeling lucky ?
Returning from CES, I wrote that “it was all about audio and video” this year – as it related to devices and services. One more data point
I'm not 100% sure on this, but doesn't YouTube get a "hit" every time one of their videos is shown? If someone takes a YouTube video and posts the code on their MySpace or TagWorld site, YouTube gets a hit according to Alexa, but it's not really relevant, or comparable to a hit to one of those photo-sharing sites.
Posted by: Randy Zaia | January 16, 2006 at 09:03 AM
Randy> You may have a point here, but isn't it the case with Flickr or any other photosharing services that syndicate content out to other sites ? As I said, Alexa is only a proxy to the real numbers (anyone having access to Comscore numbers out there ?), but it still shows a trend.
Posted by: Jeff Clavier | January 16, 2006 at 10:32 AM
You should check out vSocial, which in about two months has grown from zero to 26M monthly page views and 120K+ visitors a day.
What differentiates us from the YouTube's of the world is that we have focused on providing web based tools that enable our users to actually "do something" with their favorite clips.
This includes tools for blogging about videos, something called a video roll that enables consumers to "program" their favorite compilations within a mini player that can be embedded in a blog or community page like MySpace, and clicking "play all videos" plays the whole reel. Think: video roll on how the Iraq war went wrong, video roll of videos tagged "funny," etc.
Video clip sharing is destined to emerge as the "virtual water cooler" since a service like vSocial is both a staging ground for the content and a virtual way of connecting the dots between remote users across the web.
Towards this end, early adopters like local bands have used it as a way of connecting with and growing their audience. One band, called Broadzilla, has generated 500K+ plays of her video in 5 weeks. That changes the equation in terms of conversational marketing. In fact, fans of Family Guy have uploaded and played one clip to the tune of 1.7M times in a month plus. Could Fox buy that type of mindshare and attention? And oh by the way, the most popular landing spot for the clip? Fox’s MySpace, so I believe the net gain for savvy media players (like News Corporation) is real.
To see-touch-feel what I am talking about, check out: http://www.vsocial.com/about.php, click on home and within a click you can get a sense of what's hot, new, popular and talked about.
Mark
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vSocial: The Video Clip Sharing Community: www.vsocial.com
Tell stories, start conversations, extend the web -- with video.
Posted by: Mark Sigal | January 16, 2006 at 10:42 AM