If you are reading this, the popularity of YouTube won't be news, but there is more than one way to measure popularity writes Matthew Ricketson in his blog on The Age website. Ricketson discusses new research into Youtube being conducted by CCI's Jean Burgess and Joshua Green for the Uses of Multimedia project.
It is only three years since YouTube was quietly launched in June 2005 with a video humbly entitled `Me at the zoo', but in that time the video sharing website has grown at an extraordinary and, it seems, accelerating rate.
It now hosts around 85 million videos; just as `google' has entered the vernacular as a generic term for online searching, so `youtube' has become synonymous with video online.
Discussion of Youtube in the mainstream media usually paint it as either utopia or armageddon, but what is actually going on in the online video world, how people are using it, creating their own videos and talking about other people's videos is more complex and, I think, more interesting.
It is also of urgent importance for others in the media firmament, whether they are expanding into online video (newspapers), or anxiously awaiting the arrival of internet television (free to air, and, to a lesser extent, subscription tv) or trying to woo all these YouTubers with products to buy (advertisers).
That is certainly what emerges from the first findings of a study by two Australian researchers, Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, who have surveyed 4320 of the most popular videos on YouTube.