Internet Traffic To Video Websites Increases 178%
UK internet traffic to video websites increased by 178% between February 2007 and 2008, according to online intelligence service Hitwise.
A Hitwise custom category of the top 25 video websites in the UK accounted for 2.22% of all UK Internet visits in February 2008, equivalent for one in every 45 internet visits that month.
“Online video is growing rapidly in the UK and the primary driver for this is the increasing penetration of fast broadband connections in the UK,” said Robin Goad, director of research at Hitwise. “However, the sheer volume of compelling content out there is clearly helping to accelerate this trend.”
YouTube is the most popular video site in the UK and the eighth most visited website overall, said Hitwise.
“One of the key reasons for YouTube’s success is the strength of its brand,” said Goad. “The fourth and fifth most popular search terms in the UK during February were ‘youtube’ and ‘you tube’. The international nature of its content also plays a role: YouTube Poland (pl.youtube.com) was the 24th most visited video website in the UK last month.”
The third most visited video website in the UK during February was BBC iPlayer (www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer). The corporation’s catch-up TV streaming service has increased its market share of UK Internet visits by 423% since December 2007, and is now the 50th most visited website in the UK overall.
In February, the BBC released figures which claimed that up to 500,000 programmes are downloaded or streamed from the BBC’s iPlayer every day, with 17 million have streamed or downloaded on-demand in the application’s first seven weeks (see Over 17m Shows Downloaded On iPlayer This Year).
Hitwise said that one in every 40 searches in the UK during February 2008 resulted in a visit to a video site, up from one in every 117 a year before.
Nearly one-third of all traffic to the top 25 video sites in the UK comes from search engines, and the range and variety of videos that people are searching for continues to increase.