It looks like the “conservative” estimate by John Dvorak late last year that YouTube was generating $15 million or so per month in advertising revenues was off by a factor of about twelve. Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck reviewed a recent Google SEC filing and says YouTube generated approximately $15 million in revenue for all of 2006.
The markets are still digesting the San Francisco Chronicle “the sky is falling” story and the recent good news/bad news coming out of GooTube. But it’s just too early to tell if Google stole YouTube away from its competitors (as some Yahoo shareholders say), or if they swallowed a poison pill that they’ll soon regret. It’s clear that the big content owners like YouTube, they just don’t like it enough to put it in an iTunes-like monopsony position around television content. They are going to want to back many horses in the race.