The global phenomenon of social networking might well be mercilessly sweeping any and all forms of online competition from its path, but one stalwart entertainment destination is holding its own against the likes of Facebook and MySpace.
YouTube top of the user-created charts in both the UK and US. Credit: Jonsson/Flickr.
Specifically, video-sharing Web site YouTube has this week been crowned as the most popular user-generated site in both the United States and United Kingdom, ahead of the likes of Facebook, MySpace, and Wikipedia.
According to online usage figures amassed by research firm Nielsen, YouTube gathered in around 66.2 million (US) and 10.4 million (UK) unique visitors during the month of January.
While YouTube’s dominance in the US saw it vastly outperform the likes of News Corp.’s MySpace social networking site, that dominance was further cemented in the UK, where the video-sharing site knocked sprawling online encyclopaedia Wikipedia from top spot.
Nielsen points out that second placed Wikipedia drew some 9.6 million visitors, while the likes of Facebook pulled in 8.5 million visitors, Blogger managed to accumulate 5.1 million users for the month, and MySpace limped in with 5.02 million.
That being said, Facebook’s charging popularity is notable insofar as the wildly successful social network racked up an astonishing 712 percent in year-on-year growth when measured against the figures for January 2007.
According to a Telegraph report, five of the top-ten fastest growing Web destinations in the UK now offer a video-based social media experience, with the likes of Perfspot, Slide, Video Jug, Tuduo and Veoh all registering triple-figure growth.
Neilsen analyst Alex Burmaster has offered that such growth reflects that social media sites are no longer merely a niche corner of the Internet, but are “now the backbone supporting its growth.”
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