Videomeme

These days a feature set isn't worth much

LeeAnn Prescott posts some really interesting Hitwise statistics relevant to the rumoured Google YouTube deal. She ends the post concluding that "Google, with its great engineering team, could eventually build all the features of YouTube and make it even better for far less money than it would take to buy it, if indeed the going price is over $1 billion".

Sure. If you don't know by now that it costs less than a billion dollars to create a site better than YouTube, you're  a lost soul. But with hundreds of video sites out there, many with more interesting features than either YouTube or Google - mostly built for less than a million dollars, let alone a billion - it's not really about the feature set any more, is it? This mislocates the issue, as though Google's engineering team has just been running slowly during the first 300m and might come through on the home straight. The race is  over. Google lost. Google failed to get its strategic priorities right and trashed several billion dollars of shareholder value in the process.

We've been tracking the popularity of YouTube and Google videos for the last few weeks from a different standpoint, that of blog linkage. Google's barely a player, despite recent feature upgrades and despite the fact that it owns one of the most popular blogging platforms on the planet. The only player that runs YouTube close is MySpace, and Google had their chance there and, perhaps understandably, passed.

10,420 visits on Friday

Over 10,000 visits yesterday. We can't quite believe it. We're guessing traffic will fall off a cliff over the weekend.

OMG! Traffic!

Wow! It's been quite an exciting 24 hours.

So yesterday:

• Jeff Jarvis, the Guardian columnist, wrote a really nice piece about us on his blog 
• Frank Barnako, from CBS MarketWatch, saw Jeff's piece and phoned me up just as I was leaving the office last night to do a quick phone interview, which you can grab here 
• 2,000 people had visited the site by the end of the day (up from 1,000 people on Wednesday)

Then this morning:

• Lots of blogs had picked up on the story and there was a flurry of posts in a befuddling number of languages: German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch,  Russian, Japanese...
• We made the frontpage of del.icio.us - 212 bookmarks and counting 
• Google UK got in touch because they wanted to know  what we could tell them about the performance of their videos
  
• Over 3,000 people had visited the site by 11.00 AM!!!

Cool, eh?

Thanks to everyone who's linked to the site so far!