Viddling Around™

Today’s Guardian Unlimited is reporting that Alexa has ranked YouTube higher than MySpace for the past three months, with a 3.9% share of daily visits. What’s most significant to us here at Viddling Around is the that the average YouTube visitor spends 28 minutes on the site. That is simply amazing stats. As the web continues its shift from Pageviews to Time Spent, this puts YouTube in a strong, strong lead.

Just as important I believe is the fact that YouTube metrics are inherently “honest” traffic. If you have a MySpace account, you know how much “spam” you’re getting in bogus friend requests from various advertisers. The problem with the recent rise in MySpace stats is that it doesn’t filter out the marketing crap. So, all those ‘bot’ accounts, marketing accounts, advertising-based friend requests, et cetera are still being counted admist the traffic numbers for MySpace.

Now, just going on personal experience and that of my real flesh-and-bone friends on MySpace, we’re getting hit by an (unscientific) average of 2 per day; some higher, some lower. By my math - which is suspect to begin with - that tells me that MySpace’s recent traffic numbers could be inflated by as much as 100% or more over real traffic by actual humans.

Contrast that to YouTube, where a video watched is a video watched. No spoofing those numbers.