Vimeo and Dailymotion were big winners during YouTube’s outage

YouTube CEO Susan
Wojcicki
Steve Jennings/Getty Images
for TechCrunch

• YouTube was inaccessible for two hours on Tuesday
  evening
• The inability to log on to the Web’s second-most
  visited site, sent large numbers of people to alternative
  sources of video.
• Google Trends provides a snapshot of how people began
  searching video sites Dailymotion and Vimeo during YouTube’s
  blackout.   

YouTube’s massive sway on the world’s attention may be best
illustrated when the video-sharing site disappears.

A glitch caused the Web’s second-most visited site, behind Google
Search, to
go down for about about 90 minutes on Tuesday evening. For
Google’s rivals, YouTube’s outage was like manna from Heaven.

According to  Google Trends, a glut of people began
searching for Vimeo and Dailymotion as soon as YouTube went
offline. 

Google Trends

The blue line in the above graph reflects searches for
Dailymotion and the red is Vimeo.

Some of the terms most searched for during the outage included
“YouTube is down,” “YouTube down,” and “YouTube error.”  
   

 

Journalists often make fun of how people react in panic when a
favorite site goes dark, but YouTube has become a major source of
entertainment, news and communication for billions of people
around the world. As of May, the site had a
staggering 1.8 billion logged-in users.

And while other video sites exist, none comes close to offering
the same breath of content as YouTube.