Justin.tv, the lifecasting network which enables the most ordinary of people to become the star of their own Web TV shows, has reached its first birthday.
To celebrate, the company has published its first year statistics, and they make for impressive reading, with 87,331,037 page views in the last twelve months.
But, are they telling the full story, or giving a skewed vision of how well the network, and web television companies other than YouTube are doing?
The Truman Show Brought To Life
When Justin.tv launched last year, it was as a Truman Show type website offering viewers the chance to see the world through the eyes of CEO and co-founder of the site, Justin Kan.
At this point in time, the site was an interesting concept in what could be done with a mobile video platform, and the business of video blogging.
Expansion and Addition
Over the past year, the site has expanded to become much more than what was originally envisioned.
First of all, other 24/7 lifecasters were added to the site, and then in October of last year, Justin.tv was relaunched to become a platform for anyone with a PC, webcam, an Internet connection and a desire to show off to the world to broadcast their life over the World Wide Web.
So here we are, a year later, and the site has grown substantially, despite the emergence of several high profile competitors offering similar services.
Full First Year Stats
The stats, heralded on the Justin.tv blog today read and look as follows:
- 87,331,037 pageviews
- 24,954,403 unique visitors
- 57 years of archives
- 28106 total channels
- 356197 registered users
- 73,754 user created video clips
Illegal Content?
That’s all good, but there are concerns that the page views are being artificially inflated by illegal Arabic soccer matches and NBA games being broadcast on the site.
Whether the broadcasting of such legally iffy shows and events should be used as a way of showing off how much you have grown is debatable to say the least.
Too Much Competition
The stats also show that although Justin.tv is beating Ustream and BlogTV, Kyte.tv and Stickam are doing much better, and with so much competition vying for what is still a niche audience, something will surely give.
Lastly, there is the ever lurking presence of YouTube on the horizon, who have already stated their intention of introducing live streaming video in the not too distant future.
When that happens, I expect a lot of people currently using services such as Justin.tv will change allegiances, purely for reasons of being able to broadcast to as big an audience as possible.
