Joost Has A Heartbeat

In October we wrote “Joost Turns On Its All-Flash Website. Is Anybody Watching?” It turns out that yes, it appears that they are.

A year ago the online video site was a ghost town. Then in September, when the company moved away from the use of downloaded software to an all-browser video experience, viewership spiked. Compete says they had 550k U.S. visitors in November 2008. Comscore gives an even more robust 1.4 million worldwide monthly visitors in November (a chart below compares Joost to Hulu). Google Trends also say things are going well for Joost, and points to strong traffic growth in Northern Europe.

If this data is accurate (at least the three services agree on dramatic growth), Hulu may have a competitor coming up from behind, even as they look ahead to YouTube.