YouTube is a revolution all right, and we probably haven’t seen half of what it’s going to evolve into eventually. But even now it’s clear that the mega popular video site dominates across the world in a way that no other medium, even television, has ever done. How else to explain the mind-boggling 1.8 billion views of a Korean pop music video?
The new What We Watch site is an attempt to tap into that zeitgeist and give us a glimpse into what each country finds so fascinating in terms of YouTube videos. The site is an MIT Civic Media project, and is actually a fascinating insight in its own right, into how we are consuming and sharing media.
As you might expect sport and advertising occupy a great deal of screen time on the YouTube popularity charts, but what is surprising is the connection between countries in terms of what they find popular. The Indonesians, for example, appear to share a strong love of the One Direction band with the U.K., which is really rather creepy.
The initiative uses the relatively unknown data culled from the YouTube Trends dashboard, which is itself an excellent resource if you’re a student of global video trends and insights. Anyway, definitely worth a bookmark for a rainy day. Oh and for some reason we couldn’t get the site to play nice with our version of Firefox, but Chrome seems fine.