2.5 Billion

Posted on March 13, 2008

That’s just the number of videos viewed on YouTube in January. What are those people looking at? And who are they?

Keeping with our recent post theme, not many of the viewers are dial-up users, that’s for sure. Even as the streaming process has made it far less bandwidth intensive to show videos, few DU users are left hanging around the vid sites. They’ve pretty much tried it, seen it doesn’t work, and moved on to other things.

In YouTube’s case, and most of the other video sharing sites, it’s no great loss that the DU users have left behind. Although I’ve not seen any stats on what those 2.5 billion videos were subject wise, it’s a fair assumption that about 2 billion of them were about either funny animals, stupid tricks, horrible accidents, or sex.

In reality, there’s a lot of good, useful material out there but since most of the vid sites seem to only show front page thumbnails of what the most popular videos are, you get the impression that drivel is all that’s available.

There are a lot of clones or wannabes in this field and there’s going to be a big shakeout methinks unless some of the sites like Joost, Veoh, Revver, etc. which have had a lot of capital influx come up with a niche that endears them to a few million fans. Expect the plug to be pulled on a lot of these sites, especially if they are truly vid for profit sites. Small sites like LookVid that specialize in showing categorized videos, albeit rebroadcasts of YouTube, and cost little to maintain, will probably continue to proliferate.