One Hundred Million Views

It’s been recently revleaed that YouTube officially surpassed the 100 million viewer mark just in the USA during January, which highlights the massive growth in demand for online video.

ComScore figures suggest that US viewers consume almost 15 billion videos a month across a wide range of media sites, the majority of which comes through YouTube.

Google, who has owned the site since 2006, when it was bought for £883m, ranks as the most popular video provider in the US. Around 6.4 billion of its videos were viewed in January, reflecting 43% of the online video market.

Interestingly, although Google competitively runs Google Video, YouTube.com accounts for 99% of its video traffic. (I’m not certain if this includes the Google Video traffic that’s viewing aggregated YT videos.)

I’m just curious to know what  makes YT so popular. Perhaps it’s for the same brand-name reasons that Google is the most widely used search engine… A case of having a snappy name and being in the right place, at the right time, with the right stategy and understanding of how the online landscape is evolving? (I do realise this is a simplistic way of looking at things, but it’s Friday afternoon and my brain has fallen out of my ears).

Twitter Flies

Last year, according to Hitwise, one of the fastest growing websites was Twitter.

Over 12 months, the site saw a massive increase of traffic, and the latest data ranks the microblogging site as the 291st most visited web site in the UK, up from a ranking of 2,953. UK traffic to the site increased by a whopping 974% over the period.

Hitwise also suggested that Twitter is likely to be even more popular than the figures suggest, if statistics for people accessing their accounts via mobile phones and third-party applications were included.

As most people who are familiar with Twitter will know, it has now become an important part of the internet network, helpfully driving traffic to other sites. According to Hitwise, around 10% of redirecting tweets send users to news and media sites and over 17% end up on entertainment sites, although I’m interested to see how they accurately measured this. Thoughts, anyone?

Smelly Cavemen

Short post: New user-interactive site from Lynx, which supports their new TV campaign.

How loud can you shout at your computer?! Great stuff from the deodorant giants.

UK digital firms combat credit crunch with Texas trade tour

PRESS RELEASE: London, UK,  January 2009

35 of the UK’s leading SMEs from the digital industry head to Austin, Texas on the Digital Mission to South by South West Interactive (SXSWi) from 12-18 March 2009, one of the world’s leading conferences for emerging media. Established in 1994, the conference provides an opportunity for the Digital Mission companies to attend hundreds of conference sessions and networking events.

The Digital Mission is organised by digital networking community, Chinwag, on behalf of UKTI (UK Trade & Investment). Combined with the SXSWi, the Digital Mission provides delegates the opportunity to exhibit at SXSWi. A unique ‘Nuts and Bolts’ masterclass will help British companies understand how to establish and develop their business in the USA, taking guidance from a panel of American and British experts, whilst the “Great British Breakfast” provides a UK-focused networking event for 300 delegates during the conference.

Building on the success of the Digital Mission to New York in September 2008 - also organised by Chinwag for the UKTI – this second trip to Texas will assist firms to develop new business channels, partnerships, investment and provide a detailed knowledge of the US market.

Companies were invited to apply for the Digital Mission. The 35 successful delegates were selected from over 100 entries by an advisory board of industry experts drawn from including Mike Butcher, TechCrunch UK Editor, Herb Kim, Codeworks CEO and Sarbjit Bakhshi, Head of Information & Technology Group, UKTI.

More information about each company can be seen on the Digital Mission website:
http://www.chinwag.com/digitalmission/sxsw09-companies

For more information, please visit: http://www.digital-mission.org

Source: Sam Michel’s Chinwag blog

MySpace Music

Big brands are being stalked by MySpace to attract support for its ad-funded music service, MySpace Music, which will apparently be the social network’s biggest launch to date.

MySpace has joined forces with four major record labels, offering millions of UK consumers the opportunity to stream their entire back catalogues for free.

The site is also topped to be the biggest ad-funded music service in the UK, when it goes it goes live next year… The likes of McDonald’s, Toyota and Sony Pictures are all being hassled by the social network giant, as it offers them a variety of ad spots including a skinned player, pre-roll and in-video ads, playlist sponsorship and old-school display.

Agencies seem to be making little worried noises about the fact that the rates are likelyto  rise – but I’m more bothered about the fact you can’t download anything. On top of this, especially with Amazon’s new MP3 download service, online music seems to be getting increasingly competitive. Which hopefully means either cheap, or free…

“Come down to the library, we’ll have a wild time!” (Eddie Izzard)

Well, we would do if we could get in.

The EU’s new Europeana digital library has closed, just hours after it’s launch, due to the huge traffic volumes. Who could have ever predicted that a library would be such a cool place to go? Well, it is online, and online is undoubtably the coolest place to be.

Immediately after it got up and running, the library of Europe was experiencing an average of 10 million unique user hits per hour, swiftly crashing the system. This was on Thursaday, and still, nothing’s improved… a message on the site currently reads:  “The Europeana site is temporarily not accessible due to overwhelming interest after its launch.”

Although this digital library’s been inspired by ancient Alexandria’s attempt to collect the world’s knowledge, they really should have had the intelligence to implement a better system.

Shopping, anyone?

It seems that the next level of interactive shopping has arrived.

As if Amazon’s window-shop wasn’t enough, we now have the arrival of Mallplace.

It’s truly great; a virtual, interactive shopping mall – and just in time for Christmas! So instead of fighting over carparking spaces, wrestling in the shops and stressing over time, you can now just sit at home, chill-out and shop online.

Mallplace also has integrated other important online elements for users: you can access the latest news or browse the video offerings of Youtube, for example. A great concept and one that works extremely well – although it can’t ever replace that magical christmas feeling of late-night shopping – it will still fair extremely well in the long term, I imagine.

Say It Good

Just a random Saturday thought: Why is it that sometimes good websites have such terrible online copy?

It’s not always about what the copy says… Although bad grammar and spelling mistakes on anything except certain types of blogs drives me nuts…. But also the what the content is about. A while back I worked on an audit for an extremely large, well-known, well respected British brand. It amazed me to see, on their home page, offers for certain products that were out of date by months. What better way to reinforce public confidence than by proving you can’t even manage your website and your general organisational skills properly?

Next time anyone’s just browsing around the ‘net, have a good look at what’s being said, and who’s saying it. I think you’ll be surprised how many mistakes you’ll uncover.

Window Shopping

… Am loving the design thats gone into Amazons new platform, windowshop.

Not entirely convinced it’ll boost sales, but it’s an awesome example of 2.0 at it’s finest.

If you haven’t already seen it, go there NOW!

Told You so

Quick post, as I’m at work.

Referring to my musing on Yahoo UK, the new site has just gone live.

It looks so much better.