NEW DELHI: If you thought YouTube and Flickr were the largest video and photo sharing sites in India, it might be time to have your statistics updated.
The world’s largest social networking site, Facebook, has beaten Google’s YouTube and Yahoo’s Flickr, at least in India, to become the largest video and photo sharing site, in terms of unique visitors.
Unique user count for websites is measured using cookies. When a browser, say Chrome or Firefox, visits a website, it checks for the existence of a particular cookie (like a cookie for Facebook). Counting unique cookies gets the unique number of users.
Now, as per online audience measurement firm Vizisense, Facebook.com attracted almost 18.7 million unique users in May while YouTube.com attracted about 15.5 million and Yahoo’s Flickr attracted 1.91 million Indian users. In India, Facebook’s user base is growing at 12% each month — much higher than the 1.3% growth in YouTube’s base.
In terms of stockpile of photos too, Facebook has beaten Yahoo’s Flickr to become the largest photo database. Till date, users have uploaded over 15 billion photos which makes Facebook the biggest photo-sharing website. Yahoo’s Flickr hosts about 4 billion images.
Facebook’s rapid growth (now about 500 million users globally) means an imminent threat to the businesses of web giants like Google and Yahoo.
Most web companies want users to remain on their properties, for as long as possible. But with its large stockpile of photo and video content, Facebook is rapidly catching up and may beat Google. Users in India spend 772 seconds on Facebook per visit versus 870 seconds on Google’s YouTube. Yahoo’s Flickr lags behind at 179 seconds spent by a user per visit.
In the US, Facebook remains the No 3 video-sharing site after Youtube.com and Hulu.com on the basis of unique users, according to figures by Nielsen.
According to Alexa rating agency, Facebook has already become the world’s second-most visited website after Google.com, followed by Youtube. Though Facebook has beaten YouTube in terms of unique visitors in India, YouTube still remains number one in terms of stockpile of videos.
According to comScore, more than 14 billion videos were viewed on YouTube in May 2010. About 100 million videos are uploaded on a daily basis. But with its rapidly expanding stockpile of videos, Facebook might soon beat YouTube.
Facebook puts an official figure of 8 million active users from India. “Our strategy in India currently is not to monetise, but expand our user base,” Facebook’s manager for international marketing Meenal Balar said.
“Half of the active users in India access the website almost every day. Once a user has all his friends on the website, the usage goes dramatically up as they share videos and photos,” she said. By active users, Facebook means those who had proactively accessed the website at least once in the last 30 days.