The Net is a great equaliser, amateurs and professionals play at the same level, and, YouTube could well be the catalyst. A favourite haunt of amateur video enthusiasts, Google-owned YouTube now has the distinction of commanding 40% of all video viewing on the net in the U.S.
Comscore reports that, “Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in May with 147.2 million unique viewers.” The research firm says that in May total unique viewers of video in the U.S. were 176.3 million.
According to DailyFinance total viewing sessions across Search Engine Google’s sites reached a whopping 2.1 billion. (Viewing sessions are defined by unique visitors multiplied by the the number of times those visitors come to the site to watch a video.)
The total viewing time per unique visitor to Google sites was an extraordinary 311 minutes in May. No other site comes close. The No. 2 spot is held by premium-content site Hulu, which held its viewers’ attention for a fairly impressive 218 minutes. But Hulu only had 28.5 million unique viewers in May. Hulu visitors also tend to watch long-form content provided by media companies. YouTube is still dominated by shorter, user-created videos.
Trailing behind the major search engine in traffic, in May, were premium video site – VEVO, pioneer search engine Yahoo! and social media network Facebook.
In its initial days, YouTube was viewed doubtfully by content companies who were concerned that their videos would be pirated by the site. This fear culminated in a $1 billion copyright suit initiated by Viacom against YouTube. However, all that has changed now and the data on YouTube suggests that if it can get more premium content, it could be a leader in the business of distribution of the products of major media companies on the web.
On its road to the destination of rental and pay-per-view video YouTube has now begun a campaign to create partnerships with major media companies to bring premium content to the site, in some cases including rental and pay-per-view video. The first set of deals, with companies including Sony Pictures ,Warner Brothers, Universal and Lionsgate, was announced last month. YouTube has also become an important destination for music videos, which labels use to promote album sales.
It remains to be seen whether YouTube’s disctinction of becoming the leader in online video viewing will convert into profits for Google. The search engine has claimed that YouTube will be profitable, however, considering that the bandwidth and storage costs for its content are huge running into perhaps tens of billions of dollars, it seems to be a case of ‘the proof of the pudding lies in its eating.’ More so, when you read the DailyFinance report which states, “the most popular video on YouTube this month is a 61 second clip called “Cat mom hugs baby kitten” with 27.8 million views! Corporates would certainly not like to draw their claws against that one!