YouTube Video & Usage Facts
There’s an interesting article in the WSJ (sub req’d) on YouTube, with some data and metrics, by Lee Gomes today:
I did a scrape of YouTube a month ago and found there were 5.1 million videos. By Sunday, the end of another scrape, that number had grown by about 20% to 6.1 million. Because we know how many videos have been uploaded to the site, the length of each, and how many times it has been watched (total views were 1.73 billion as of Sunday) we can do a little multiplication to find out how much time has collectively been spent watching them…
YouTube videos take up an estimated 45 terabytes of storage — about 5,000 home computers’ worth — and require several million dollars’ worth of bandwidth a month to transmit…
Johan Pouwelse, a Delft professor who helped develop a peer-to-peer, video-sharing technology at Delft called Tribler…reports that 70% of YouTube’s registered users are American and roughly half are under 20 years of age.
According to comScore, almost 70% of the online population has watched online video and the average consumer watches 73 minutes of online video a month.
YouTube has grown from roughly 58,000 monthly visitors in August of last year to more than 20 million today. (Now that’s a “hockey stick.”)
If Gomes is correct about YouTube’s costs, the site will run out of money quickly unless it more aggressively monetizes its traffic and page views – which it’s starting to do. But it’s hard to believe that any new ad revenues will cover those costs (unless it does a MySpace-like paid search deal with a major player).
So even though it’s got a huge valuation (in excess of $1 billion), YouTube may be forced to sell sooner than it would like because of its massive overhead.
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According to May, 2006 data from Hitwise the top five video sites are:
* YouTube: 42.94%
* MySpace Video: 24.22%
* Yahoo! Video Search: 9.58%
* MSN Video Search: 9.21%
* Google Video: 6.48%
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Greg Sterling is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, a consulting and research firm focused on online consumer and advertiser behavior and the relationship between the Internet and traditional media, with an emphasis on the local marketplace.
