YouTube clearly trumps web 2.0 technologies
One of the blogs I read daily is Micro Persuasion by Steve Rubel. He had an interesting post today about a little data mining he did with some web 2.0 terms like widgets, Second Life, podcasts, blogs, and RSS feeds. It was interesting to see that blogs are the clear front runner in popularity among these areas but the surge in Second Life interest was exciting as well.
What was noticeably absent from the list was any reference to online video. I did the same search as Steve did but dropped the RSS feeds and added YouTube. What I found was staggering. YouTube makes the other technologies look like nothing. I expected YouTube to be a contender with blogs but not trounce it the way it did. I was just telling someone today that there's been a rise in online video interest over the last year. This data suggests that it's not a mere rise, but rather a massive surge. So what's the moral of the story? If you're not thinking about online video right now you're getting behind very quickly.
2 comments:
One of the interesting things about these serach trends from Google is that they are a bit skewed. Check out this article by Stan Schroeder about how many internet users have made it a habit to use Google as an address bar - going to Google and typing in "myspace" every time they want to check out their MySpace page, etc. Thus, searches into Google, especially for high profile web service like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube are inflated compared to more common terms. We also have to consider the Firefox users that simply type the first part of a domain to reach a desired site - I know I use this shortcut frequently. For example, if I wanted to direct myself to YouTube, I could type "youtube" in my address bar. If there is no domain extension present, Firefox will quickly query Google and then direct your browser to the top site in the search results. This habit also inflates the numbers for high profile sites.
I agree that YouTube has had a surge in traffic over the past 6 months. However, the statistics from Google are going to be exaggerated when compared to common words such as "widgets", "podcasts", "blogs", and "RSS feeds."
Compared to a trends trend map such as this comparing MySpace, Yahoo, Facebook, GMail, and YouTube you can see that YouTube falls into place with these other high profile sites.
Good point Nathan. I hadn't considered people using Google search as an address bar. It makes sense that it would skew the data.
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