Pages

Friday, September 12, 2008

YouTube vs. Everyone Else: No Contest


While online viewing is still a nascent business, trying to find a revenue model to support its growth, trends are already appearing. And over the last year, You Tube continues to increase usage, while the rest of the market is flat. Year over year, You Tube has doubled in size, and moving from 26% market share to 44%. The rest of the market "declined from 6.8 billion monthly views a year ago to 6.4 billion in July. And that includes Hulu.com, which started at nothing in March and grew to more than 100 million monthly views in four months."

To me, it seems to indicate the viewer prefers the web for shorter form content. While it may be interesting to catch up on full length episodes of shows, the web makes it easier to search for titles, but most prefer to watch these longer shows on their bigger TVs. There is still a growth market on the web and ad dollars will follow. "Google is making money from a tiny fraction of YouTube's videos, while sites like ABC.com or Hulu.com earn advertising revenue from every video streamed." Web viewing remains a fraction of total TV viewing. And over the last year, the web viewing trend remains flat.