Justin.TV as a country | Hacker News Reader

Justin.TV as a country

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18 pointsabstractbill12 comments

My startup's user population is currently hovering somewhere between that of Pitcairn Islands and Vatican City. But with hard work, luck, and a dash of moxie, I hope to someday achieve Tokelau levels of citizenship.

i'd be interested in how much money justin.tv makes as compared to various countries' GDPs

I have a site with more users! Admittedly 98% of these are spam signups or people who don't use the site anymore, but it's the raw numbers that count, right?

right?

No, of course not. So they've hit user #2,500,000. How many of those users are active? Last day? Seven days? How many actually broadcast?

ajkirwin - that's a great question!

You are correct user numbers are exciting but not everything.

One number that we use to gauge overall usage of the site is the total amount of video watched per month. It can be argued that for an online video site - the volume of video watched is the primary metric by which to define the success of the product.

In October 2008 there were over 2000 years of video watched on Justin.tv.

2000 years equals:

24,000 months 720,000 days 17,280,000 hours 1,036,800,000 minutes

Everyday over 570,000 hours of video are watched on the Justin.tv live video network.

That is quite a feat for an 11 person company don't you think?

See, now THAT is impressive ;)

And I don't really have that many users. 1,840~ activated users at last count. Which puts me between Niue and the Falkland Islands :D

Sorry, I'm having trouble reconciling those numbers. Assuming 2.5 Million users:

2000 Years of video watching a month comes out to about 7 hours/month/user.

5.7 Million hours a day comes out to over 2 hours/day/user, or about 60 hours/month/user.

I think one of those numbers is off by an order of magnitude ... Or is my my math wrong?

Your math isn't wrong, but the assumption that you have to register as a Justin.TV user in order to watch video is wrong.

In either case, the numbers still don't reconcile.

Is the 5.7 Million hours of video/day number right, or is the 2000 Years of video/month right?

2000 Years of video/month only works out to half a million hours per day ... not 5 million. They still differ by an order of magnitude.

Smanek - your right - I misplaced a decimal point - corrected above.

Thanks :)

Actually we're growing so fast right now that your way of measuring things (active users in the last N days) doesn't help much - most of our total signups occurred very recently - that's just the nature of exponential growth.

As Michael says, a better way to measure the success of a video site is probably how much video people are watching. I posted this mostly just for the fun of comparing us to different countries, not because I think it's the best way to measure our site.

How many of those users are active? Last day? Seven days? How many actually broadcast?

I would bet that the average Justin.tv user is more actively involved in JTV than the average Latvian is involved in Latvia. I mean, sure, they report 2.3 million registered residents, but how many of them voted in the last day? Last seven days? How many of them actually run for office?

How many of them worked? Paid taxes? Contributed to growth in the Latvian economy and GDP? Helped a little old lady across the street?

You don't have to lead or influence leaders to contribute, and I think contribution is the key to the ajkirwin's point.

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