Number 5: YouTube
It is testament to the sheer scale of web innovation in the last ten years that YouTube only just makes the top five.
It feels like the video sharing site has been around for ever but it is still a few weeks short of its fifth birthday (although it didn’t officially launch until November 2005). Its potential however was almost immediately obvious and twelve months later it was snapped up by Google for $1.65 billion.
A lot of the numbers associated with YouTube are astounding. In October this year co-founder of the site Chad Hurley announced that YouTube was getting “well over a billion views a day” worldwide. The Susan Boyle X-Factor video alone received over 120 million hits in 2009.
YouTube is also the 2nd largest search engine in the United States (after its owner Google). In October there were a total of more than 3.7 Billion search queries on YouTube as measured by comScore compared with Yahoo which has a billion fewer queries per month.
It is likely that the biggest impact is yet to come. Hunter Walk the Director of Product Management at the sites believes the new frontier is the battle for TV dominance “Our average user spends 15 minutes a day on the site, they spend about five hours in front of the television.” YouTube is already a major broadcast channel for short clips but with leaps forward in video quality and a series of content deals it is sey to become a major player in the delivery of long form content – or what you and I call films and television.
PR and the Social Web 