Video Viewing Sites And What The Data Tells Us

This data was originally featured in the November 29th, 2023 newsletter found here: DEALING WITH FAILURE, VIDEO VIEWING SITES

Originally, I had the idea of trying to visualize whether the entertainment industry strikes had any impact on video viewing habits. To that end, I pulled website visit traffic data from a dozen popular sites like YouTube, Playstation.com, Twitch, etc. using Semrush’s API to see if there was any pattern discernible.

All that went out the window the moment I looked at the first chart, which was a linear graph of visits to this basket of sites:

That brownish-red line? That’s YouTube. The blue line beneath it – FAR beneath it – is Instagram. That gives you a sense of the scale and power that YouTube commands. Everything else in entertainment is basically a rounding error compared to YouTube’s dominance.

When we rescale the chart to logarithmic just so that we can see ANY detail about the other services, here’s what we see:

YouTube is in the lead with more than 100 BILLION visits a month on average. In second place is Instagram with around 7 billion visits a month, followed by Tiktok with about 3.5 billion visits a month. Below that is Twitch, with about a billion and a half visits a month, and then finally Netflix with also about a billion and a half visits a month.

Think about that for a moment.

Netflix – the service that’s synonymous with streaming video – earns about 1% of what YouTube earns in terms of monthly visits.

If you’re producing video content, or you aspire to produce video content in the coming year that you want socialized, there is one platform you cannot do without, and that is YouTube. No matter where else you put your video, if you’re not putting it on YouTube, you’re missing the boat.