UK ISP says Netflix is more popular than YouTube

Could Netflix be more popular than YouTube? That’s what Plusnet, a popular UK ISP is indicating in a post on the company’s blog.

Written by senior product specialist Dave Tomlinson, the post goes into detail about traffic patterns on the ISP, with a focus on Netflix and YouTube in particular. Here’s the long and the short of it: YouTube still gets more traffic on Plusnet overall but Netflix sees a significant spike in usage in the afternoons and evenings — “most likely once the children have gone to bed,” Tomlinson writes. Netflix has also seen a dramatic growth in traffic since it first debuted in the UK two years ago.

Still, Tomlinson says, “Netflix now battles it out with YouTube for most usage on our network” and notes that this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since one in ten households in the UK now have a Netflix subscription. That amounts to 1.5 million households, all of which have signed up in the last year alone.

All of this bodes well for Netflix expansion goals. The company is set to launch in six more European countries this year. Earlier this month, the company reported it had surpassed HBO in quarterly revenue. And in the latter half of July, Netflix hit 50 million global subscribers.

Netflix officially launched in the UK in January 2012.