Taiwan just cannot get enough of YouTube
YouTube views from Taiwan rocketed 60 per cent this year from 2012
PUBLISHED : Friday, 06 December, 2013, 7:55pm
UPDATED : Tuesday, 10 December, 2013, 5:17pm
Bryan Harris [email protected]
95 per cent of Taiwanese internet users said they watch YouTube at home, while 23 per cent admitted using the website at work. Photo: AFP
It seems that Taiwan just cannot get enough of online videos.
In the past year, the number of viewing hours Taiwanese spent on video sharing site YouTube rocketed 60 per cent from 2012. Furthermore, the number of hours spent viewing videos on mobile phones increased threefold.
The findings come from an online survey by YouTube’s parent company Google between April and May of this year and testify to the increasing popularity of social media and video-sharing web sites across the island region.
According to the survey and data released by the company, 95 per cent of Taiwanese internet users said they watch YouTube at home, while 23 per cent admitted using the website at work.
Moreover, nearly 20 per cent of respondents said they watched YouTube videos on their mobile phones - a three-fold jump from the previous year.
Taiwan has seen dramatic growth in Internet users in recent years. About 70 per cent of the island’s population is online, with 60 per cent of all homes connected to the web. In contrast to mainland China, the government in Taipei does not restrict access to certain web sites and has a relatively open stance on Internet regulation.
Social media has also seen an explosion of users in the past five years, with Facebook maintaining a penetration rate of about 62 per cent. Given the sensationalist and often politicized nature of traditional media in Taiwan, many users have taken to social media as a means of obtaining more diverse information.
According to the survey, music videos (62 per cent) are the most popular videos on YouTube, followed by private videos (51 percent) and TV programs (42 per cent).
About 1 billion unique users worldwide visit YouTube each month, with 80 per cent of traffic coming from outside the US, company statistics showed.
