Facebook beats YouTube, Flickr as top video, photo-sharing site in India

If you thought YouTube and Flickr were the largest video and photo sharing sites in India, it is time to get updated on website popularity stats.

The largest social networking site globally, Facebook, has pipped Google's YouTube and Yahoo's Flickr, in India, to emerge the top video and photo sharing site, on the basis of number of unique visitors.

For websites the unique user count is kept by cookies. When a browser, say Chrome or Firefox, visits a website, the site checks for the existence of a particular cookie (like a cookie for Facebook) and the unique cookie count gives the number unique of users.

According to online audience measurement firm Vizisense, Facebook.com attracted around 18.7 million unique users in May whereas YouTube.com attracted around 15.5 million and Yahoo's Flckr got 1.91 million Indian users. In India, the user base of Facebook is growing at 12 per cent a month, much higher than the 1.3 per cent growth in YouTube's base.

In terms of the number of photos too, Facebook has beaten Yahoo's Flickr to become the largest photo database. It hosts over 15 billion photos uploaded by users making it the biggest photo-sharing website. Yahoo's Flickr, on the other hand, hosts about 4 billion images.

Analysts say Facebook's rapid growth, ( it boasts around 500 million users globally) poses a potential threat to the businesses of web giants like Google and Yahoo.