14 DAY TRIAL // The popular video sharing website YouTube recently just set a world record, as far as the number of unique visitors and the number of videos watched were concerned. The company dominated the market, and literally dusted the competition, while at the same time registering a 13 percent increase in views from December 2007. It's now safe to say that Google made a very good move in acquiring the website, although YouTube was a leader even before the acquisition.
According to Internet monitor comScore, the last month of 2008 was one of the best officially recorded by the video industry as a whole, on account of the fact that it provided videos to over 30 million uniques users, who watched their favorite clips more than 4 billion times. As far as numbers go, no other video-sharing site on the web can now compare to YouTube, which is currently the official “king of the jungle.”
The Google-owned sharing platform registered 24 million unique visitors. Basically, this means that it managed to make itself known to 77 percent of the potential market. Reaching such a massive percentage of a target population (in its case everyone with an Internet connection) is an impressive achievement, and a new record for such sites on the web.
In terms of the number of videos being watched, YouTube registered over 2 billion views, which amounted to more than half of the total number of clips that were watched online in December. Other sites that drew a lot of people were various BBC outlets, which accumulated about 60 million views, followed by Microsoft and Megavideo.
As far as users went, BBC sites again scored second, with more than 7 million unique users, trailed by Microsoft and then eBay. The trends, comScore says, are pretty clear, and YouTube will most likely continue to climb in people's preferences, even tough there are other alternatives to the popular platform.