YouTube 2009: what we watched

David Heath
Thursday, 17 December 2009 11:11

Your IT - Home IT

Tracking our searching and watching habits over the past year, YouTube has some interesting insights to share.

In their official blog post overnight, YouTube announced our favourites for 2009.  There were few surprises.

Yes, Susan Boyle won.  By a country mile.  Over 120 million views of her audition video; next was a home video of a seven-year-old after just visiting the dentist with 37 million.

The wedding entrance dance was third with33 million.  Strange, I thought everyone on the Internet had viewed it.  I was wrong; perhaps 33 million people downloaded it and shared it with everyone they knew.  This is the problem with these statistics – they only show views sourced from YouTube, not the download-and-email views.

YouTube also tracked what we searched for, and month-by-month, we see the world's top stories roll through.  Inauguration in January, Christian Bale in February (remember his epic dummy-spit?); in May we had Pacquiao vs Hatton (they're boxers – I had to Google it!).  Michael Jackson topped both June and July and everyone's favourite loose cannon, Kanye West topped the polls in September.  December very obviously featured Mr Eldrick Woods (Tiger to his pals).

YouTube has obviously also become one of Hollywood's best marketing channels, with three movie trailers (“New Moon,” “Watchmen” and “Paranormal Activity”) featuring prominently; in fact New Moon was the fourth most downloaded video of the year, just ahead of the Roller Babies. 

Earlier this year, YouTube stated that on average they were receiving around 20 hours of uploaded content for every minute of every day.  I also recall hearing a tale that suggested that the entire amount of data transferred across all of the Internet in (I think it was) 1989 is downloaded from YouTube every 21 minutes.

How far we have come!