People often look at the number of visitors that a website receives, and how many pages that visitors look at on the site, to decide whether a website is popular or not. An easy way to do that is just too simply check the Alexa traffic rank of a website.

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?

We know that internet video has really taken off but just take a look at the growth of some example video related sites. The growth of video sharing sites like YouTube and Metacafe are phenomenal.

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.