YouTube has released a subtly redesigned site today, complete with a marginally updated logo and a series of cosmetic improvements. Although not immediately obvious (the homepage is unchanged), this is one of the site's most detailed redesigns so far, with the Videos section gaining red buttons and fonts, the Channels section going green and the Groups section becoming orange. The social filters have moved too: they now appear down the left hand side, rather than along the top. They've added a footer to every page for quick access to key features, and the menu under the player has been redesigned with new icons and more javascript. The most notable additions to this menu are more advanced stats (for more advanced YouTube gaming!) and a section that displays all the sites linking to the video: these are essentially trackbacks, encouraging users to link more frequently to the clips. Changing a much-loved site is always a risk, but these tweaks do seem like an improvement.
Meanwhile, ComScore released stats on their Top Web Properties today showing that Wikipedia and YouTube are flying up the rankings - both sites made a 12% gain in unique visitors in September compared to their August stats. Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are the top three, with the popularity of Microsoft's sites due in part to their Automatic Updates on Windows PCs. Wikipedia served 154 million unique visitors in September, putting it in sixth place by ComScore's measurements. YouTube, meanwhile, is ranked 14th, with 81 million uniques in September. If YouTube were to be counted as part of the Google network of sites, it would put Google in the number one spot ahead of Microsoft. Nobody is disputing, in fact, that YouTube is growing like crazy: the data from Compete shows that YouTube is growing faster than MySpace did in the early days. I'm sticking to my conviction that YouTube will one day be bigger than MySpace, probably within 18 months, and possibly a lot less.
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