In October we wrote “Joost Turns On Its All-Flash Website. Is Anybody Watching?” It turns out that yes, it appears that they are.
A year ago the online video site was a ghost town. Then in September, when the company moved away from the use of downloaded software to an all-browser video experience, viewership spiked. Compete says they had 550k U.S. visitors in November 2008. Comscore gives an even more robust 1.4 million worldwide monthly visitors in November (a chart below compares Joost to Hulu). Google Trends also say things are going well for Joost, and points to strong traffic growth in Northern Europe.
If this data is accurate (at least the three services agree on dramatic growth), Hulu may have a competitor coming up from behind, even as they look ahead to YouTube.
isn’t that traffic spike just an obvious consequence when moving from desktop to web?
Also the effect of a lot of PR money. They were featured on every major publication online, including techcrunch.
I’m with you on this – I’ve seen similar stats too many times to get excited over it. Plus, I would not rely on Compete data if my life depended on it!
So, what is wrong with Compete, after all
? (they track only US visitors)
Alexa is not precise, Comscore the same, Compete the same…
What are quite precise are their internal stats which probably they don’t make it public…
It’s also and finally a good service to use!
No desktop app needed, no silly plug-in, no sign up required with annoying talking character, facebook connect!
congrats to them and thanks! One of the online TV sites I use daily now (they have Friends episodes).
However, looking at the graph shows that at the moment of the release of the new flash player, Hulu experienced a growth twice as steep as Joost’s, and they already had 2500% more traffic. Sad.
Content is king.
that was SNL, debates and election stuff. temporary.
I disagree – and so do others.
http://blogs.re...ut-sarah-palin/
Maybe this will put some pressure on Hulu to open up outside of the USA.
I bet Joost will win in the end, and the American TV networks will end up having their content on both. I can’t see it happening the other way around, where Hulu actually opens itself up.
I disagree; I don’t see how Hulu won’t stay on top. I realize the US boundary thing is complicated with copyright issues, but it comes down to content being king. And at least in the US, that means Hulu and their full episodes of lots of great TV series.
Hulu’s site says they can only stream their video lib within the US – no love foe us up here in Canada
Guess which site I am going to visit from now on.
@peterurban
they can only stream in the US because they would jeopardise international TV sydication deals, which are worth billions of dollars. Real money.
Are you saying that the US television market and corresponding ad-revenue isn’t real money?
I’ve been having a great time recently watching South Park episodes through their South Park Studios site and I’ll still watch them on UK television when they finally air (with ads) and I’ll still go out and buy the box set.
In fact, their openness in allowing me to watch their show anywhere in the world, which I do when I’m travelling rather than paying for crappy hotel pay per view channels (yeah, yeah) means I feel more compelled to give them my money because I feel they care about their viewers.
No Mike, what he is saying is that they have have sold the rights to international broadcasers who can pay upwards of 2000$ per viewing hour, as they have the CPM’s to support this. All the broadcasters now automaitically include online rights in this deal, as most of them have their own online offerings which they then offer the shows to. Even if they do not have and online offering most countries need to have the shows dubbed, which can cost even more than the licensing, which mans that even in FOX has the rights for a show in France, they may not have the language dub, and so leave it to the online portal to foot the bill, which in most cases does not amke business sense due to small online CPM’s.
Joost is not only moving to Flash they are also looking at devices like their iPhone app and various set top box manufactures are adding Joost functionality .DivX Connect and Neuros already have Joost running and Boxee has partnered with Joost .
http://labs.divx.com/node/7598
http://open.neu...t/joost-tv-link
Personally I would like to see Joost on the Wii and their old desktop Client UI was would be well suited to the Wii Remote . In Japan there are going to be two TV streaming apps lunched on the Wii this year, so theres less technical hurdles developing for the Wii just business hurdles .
Heres hoping Joost’s Product development team are reading .
Doesn’t the Wii already have the Opera browser, and, therefore, can already access Joost’s content?
oh…cool
I use Joost and Hulu all the time and it seem they got to a threshold where there are 57 channels and there is nothing on. I expect YouTube to run more and more premium content too.
Mike, I dunno if you saw this with the crunchies and all the stuff you’re doing
http://www.blog...for-dell/print/
Regardless of whether the growth is due to its PR campaign, or its switch to web-based, it’s frigging impressive growth in viewer #s. Watch your back hulu.
Not if they were all the same viewers who previously were using the desktop app and then when they got booted stuck around and switched to the web site. This would put them in terms of ads watched around about where they were anyway, maybe a little bit of growth but nothin as spectacular as the graph might lead you to believe.
Joost’s web service was a bit clumsy when they launched but it’s getting better. I watch the film “Secret Service” the other night on my HDTV and it streamed beautifully for the full hour and a half. You can find Joost, Hulu and lots of other Internet television channels on Zipityzap. PCTVCables.com
oh cool!!
I have used joost a lot in its early days!!
You link to Google Trends for Search, the for websites shows an initial peak and then a levelling off of traffic.
http://trends.g...st.com&sa=N
All Joost has to do is cover soccer matches, the #1 sport in the world and they will be guaranteed success. There is a whole world of content outside the US.
Does this take into account the Joost mobile app (iphone) traffic?
with all the capital it raised the fact that joost is still foundering all these years later shows that it’s just not attractive to users.
youtube
hulu
p2p file nets have all the shows
joost’s idea is just not strong enough
its investors wasted their money on this one
Joost’s site, interface, etc. always seemed cleaner & more appealing to me than Hulu/Veoh. Good for them.
Also interesting, joost seems to be doing better than hulu in time spent: http://siteanal...?metric=avgStay