But just because a site is busy does not mean that people necessarily like it more than a site which is less busy. But how could you see how much people actually like a site?

Use Del.icio.us to compare popularity

Well you could check how many times people have bookmarked all the pages from a site (not just the homepage) in Del.icio.us. People will only tend to bookmark something if they find it interesting.

It is pretty much impossible to find out how many Del.icio.us bookmarks a website has. You would have to search for every single page of that website in Del.icio.us and add then together all the bookmarks. Can you imagine doing that for a site like YouTube?

Well I thought of a way to cheat! That is by simply checking how many backlinks a website has from Delicious to the website in question. I did this by just using the following query in Yahoo:

linkdomain:youtube.com site:del.icio.us

That query returns 46,000 backlinks from Del.icio.us to pages on YouTube. Compare that to its competitor MetaCafe.com which only has 2,560 backlinks from Del.icio.us.

It is safe to say that the more backlinks from Del.icio.us, the more bookmarks in Del.icio.us, and hence the more people like the site.

I crunched some numbers and found that often the number of backlinks was 1/10th of the actual number Del.icio.us bookmarks (but that’s a very rough estimate). So now you have a very easy way to estimate Del.icio.us bookmarks by just multiplying the number of backlinks by 10.

To get an idea of how well a site is liked you also need to measure the number of Del.icio.us bookmarks against the traffic of a website. I’ve just simply compared it against Alexa Rank in the table below.

Popularity of ten video sites compared using Del.icio.us bookmarks and Alexa Traffic Rank:

• As you can see YouTube.com is immensely popular compared to its closest competitors MetaCafe and DailyMotion.
• Joost stands out as a website which is already proving popular compared to sites with similar traffic.
• Flurl.com stands out as a very busy site which few people actually bookmark, indicating people just visit in passing and it lacks a solid community.

I think the number of Del.icio.us bookmarks definately helps to point out the sites that have a more loyal community, compared to websites where people just visit it in passing.

Now we are also beginning to see the growth of video search engines that index video from a variety of sources. These video search engines are lagging behind the major video sharing sites, but will these search engines ever catch them up?

graph courtesy of alexa

YouTube.com

The leading website for sharing and watching online video clips. The company was recently sold for $1.77 billion to Google. It now ranks as the 4th busiest site on the internet and receives an estimated 20 million unique users per month, but it could be over 30 million by now. YouTube was officially launched in December 2005 and has seen huge growth since the middle of 2006.