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YouTube to Overtake BBC in UK Visits
June 20, 2007
Today, we are issuing a news release about the growth of the Entertainment category. In doing our research, we noticed that YouTube looks set to overtake BBC.co.uk in share of UK visits within a matter of weeks.
The Entertainment category overtook the Shopping and Classifieds category in share of weekly UK Internet visits for the first time (in the past two years) in the week ending 26th May 2007. The Entertainment category has maintained the lead throughout June and so will overtake retail websites as the #3 most popular category (after Search Engines and Adult) in June. In preparing the news release we looked closely at the top ranked Entertainment websites and noticed that YouTube is rapidly closing the gap with the Beeb.
Last week, BBC.co.uk ranked #14 among All Categories of websites with 0.82% of all UK Internet visits compared to YouTube's #25 ranking with 0.81% of UK Internet visits. The gap between the two websites is closing rapidly. Last week, BBC had a 1.6% lead on YouTube in share of UK visits, down from 37% three months ago and 131% six months ago.
BBC.co.uk has been the #1 ranked Entertainment website each week for the past two years and YouTube has held the #2 position since October 2006.
Share of UK visits to BBC.co.uk continue to grow, up 13% year on year in May, however it is far outpaced by gains from YouTube. YouTube's share of UK visits were up nearly 7-fold (669%) year on year in May and up 140% in the past six-months.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 10:24 AM
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Comments
Lloyd, Good question. The quick answer is that we exclude off-network traffic so that our data reflects the consumer experience to the greatest extent possible. The traffic we are reporting is visits to YouTube.com - rather than content served by YouTube.
We do this by excluding URLs (and sub-directories) that serve content on other sites. For example, YouTube videos on MySpace are often served from the URL www.youtube.com/v. This sub-directory is excluded so those videos do not count as visits to YouTube.
Heather
Posted by Heather Hopkins | June 20, 2007 03:04 PM
BBC.co.uk's a big website. Are you referring only to the bbc.co.uk property or also to subsite offshoots like news.bbc.co.uk, which is significant?
Posted by Robert Andrews | June 21, 2007 02:02 AM
Heather. I'm assuming you separate out news.bbc.co.uk and bbc.co.uk when compiling your data . Is that right ?
So although YT is close to bbc.co.uk in terms of share, its still a long way behind the entire BBC website. (which includes news and sport hosted on news.bbc.co.uk) ?
Doesn't news.bbc.co.uk have almost an equal share to bbc.co.uk.
Anyway all good stuff. thanks for continuing to surface this stuff and being open with your data.
I work for the BBC btw.
Posted by Jem Stone | June 21, 2007 06:51 AM
Jem, Robert, Yes, we report each BBC domain separately, so weather, news, sports, etc. are all reported separately.
The chart on this post (and data) is based only on bbc.co.uk, the largest of the BBC domains, based on share of UK visits. Last week, BBC News was next highest ranked BBC domain, at #14 among All Categories of websites.
It's not quite as easy as adding share between different domains as news.bbc.co.uk received nearly one quarter (24%) of its traffic from BBC.co.uk last week.
We report each domain individually to allow for as granular a view as possible when reporting our data.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Thanks, Heather
Posted by Heather Hopkins | June 25, 2007 11:12 PM
Heather - fascinating. Does this include all YouTube's "off-network" traffic (ie, from videos embedded on other site), or is it all to youtube.com?
Posted by Lloyd Shepherd | June 20, 2007 06:09 AM