Unhappy Eighth Birthday, YouTube
Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) YouTube, which was founded eight years ago, has barely changed, except for the number videos posted at the site. It brings in almost no revenue for the search company, and its content remains dominated by low-resolution amateur video. In nearly a decade, YouTube has not grown up at all.
In a blog post about the eighth year anniversary, the "YouTube" Team bragged:
Today, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That's more than four days of video uploaded each minute! Every month, more than 1 billion people come to YouTube to access news, answer questions and have a little fun. That's almost one out of every two people on the Internet.
Movie and TV studios are not adding content at anywhere near that rate. The figure only proves that short clips from people who have no interest in premium video remain the biggest part of the site's inventory, and the part that is growing fastest.
YouTube's numbers are hugely impressive. Google video sites, made up almost exclusively of YouTube, had 153.9 million unique visitors in March, according to research firm comScore. No other sites where even close. Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) had the largest figure among the portals with 50.3 million visitors in March. Another contrast is that visitors to YouTube watched an average of 1,202.6 minutes in March. For Yahoo! the comparable number was 59.1 minutes.
YouTube's advantage among its competitors ends with size. The video content at Yahoo!, AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) is almost all professionally produced. Advertisers are happy to run marketing messages next to or in this content. YouTube has some movie trailers on its home page. It also has content there that includes "How to Disappoint Your Parents in 61 Seconds" and "The Disgusting Little Things That People Do." Among those things is watching disgusting videos on YouTube.
Happy birthday.
Filed under: 24/7 Wall St. Wire, Internet Tagged: AOL, featured, GOOG, MSFT, YHOO
