YouTube on a fast-paced growth in the UK: the social video power

Lately, I have been busy with a pile of work while delaying this article about a new growing trend. For the first time, YouTube property UK grabbed more audience growth in a year than any other social media site in the country (while Facebook’s audience was slowly decreasing).

It might seem a small move but it’s not: YouTube reached a critical size in terms of both quality and quantity, as well as providing way more freedom. We also notice that its mobile consumption is growing fast too.

YouTube is the UK’s second-largest social networking site

YouTube has retained its title as the fastest-growing social network in the UK for the second month in a row. Facebook, however, has lost market share over the same period.

Experian Hitwise, a digital intelligence service, released the figures showing that YouTube had increased its market share from 19.06 percent in March 2011 to 20.03 percent in April 2011. These figures are in comparison to the video streaming site’s market share of 16.92 percent in April 2010.

Facebook, meanwhile, has seen decreased traffic – it still remains the largest social networking site on the internet, but its share dropped to 54.8 percent in April 2011 – the first time the figure has been below 55 percent since August 2010.

Source : inspiresme.co.uk

And I do think it will follow the same path in the whole UE in the next monthes, also because YouTube owns pros that might not be beaten easily by competition. With its revamped “Channel” feature, this site now empowers users with strong, simple and actionable user-generated content that could be found elsewhere, but not in such quantity and quality. Compared to other social media sites, the channel feature is light-weight, easy to setup (also in terms of privacy) and enable users to talk quite quickly around videos they like – with a great offer. Something that might seem obvious, whereas every action in a leisure social media site is way more complicated because of its offer’s depth.

Another standing that can’t be easily tracked with common white papers and “think-tank” advice or such: video media brings a lot of emotional drive in the online behavior, way more than others like writing or reading. I think it creates some kind of incentive to comment (whether in a positive or negative fashion).
Following this, I wonder about one statement I’m thinking about for years: “if your site brings a huge number of comments and reactions – more than competitors, does it mean you control the game?”. I’ve been thinking about that for years, and I’d welcome any idea on the issue.

Anyway, I think we shall keep an eye on YouTube – I shall say the social video site – in the next monthes, as part of the G brand spearhead with Plus to counter-strike one of its strongest indirect competitor.

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