James Delahunty
12 Jan 2008 20:20
Traffic to the BBC's iPlayer service in the UK increased 14 times overall within the space of a month. The impressive gains were made between week ending 08 December 2007 and the week ending 05 January, with the service ranking 80th in the UK in the latter week, peaking at 62nd on New Years Day. Surfers looking to catch up on their soap operas gave a boost to the service, with Eastenders driving a large amount of users to iPlayer.
Other popular program searches were Live at the Apollo, Three men in another boat and Holby City. Over half of the traffic going to the iPlayer website came from other BBC websites, as the corporation has been aggressively promoting its service online. While such services from TV broadcasters are always a step in the right direction, the iPlayer still pales in comparison to the video heavyweight YouTube.
For the week ending January 5th, YouTube accounted for 8.75% of all UK Internet visits to Entertainment websites, over 12 times the market share of iPlayer, with YouTube being the 4th most search term in the UK currently. The average visit time for iPlayer is currently just under nine minutes, compared with almost 20 minutes for YouTube.
Of course, YouTube has been around much longer and has far more video content to offer than BBC's iPlayer.
Source:
Pocket-Lint.co.uk