We’ve been hearing for some time (starting with an ex-Youtube employee) that the number of video streams per day reported by Comscore, Nielsen and other metrics services way under-report on Youtube’s total video streams.
It’s hard to compare apples to apples, though. Recent Comscore data says Google/YouTube streams just under 7 billion videos per month in the U.S., up from around 5 billion/month late last year. That’s about 225 million streams a day, which still puts them well above all the next major competitors (MySpace, Hulu, Yahoo, Viacom, Microsoft, etc.). Nielsen says Google/YouTube streams 5.5 billion videos/month in the U.S.
But the real number of streams/day, we’ve now confirmed with a source at Google, is above 1.2 billion/day worldwide. That matches what we’ve heard from other sources. That pretty much means everyone on the Internet, on average, is watching one YouTube video per day.
Google hasn’t commented on this in the past, and we can’t figure out exactly why. It may have to do with ongoing litigation and the desire to keep exact numbers quiet. Or it may be that they don’t necessarily want analysts to have deep insight into YouTube’s true cost structure.
We’ve spoken to Comscore about this casually in the past, and they’ve noted that their estimates are based on available data, and that data doesn’t involve direct access to YouTube servers. Some companies choose to give Comscore deep access, others don’t. The data quality suffers accordingly.
But one thing is clear. Comscore thinks the total online video space is around 17 billion monthly streams in the U.S. We now know that YouTube alone serves that many video streams every fifteen days or so worldwide. Time to revise those numbers up – if YouTube has 40% of the online market share for video like Comscore says (it may actually be much higher market share, another reason Google may not want this data out there), that means the total number of video streams on the Internet is approaching 80 billion/month, a heady number.
We’ve approached MySpace and Hulu, the no. 2 and no. 3 online video services, for their exact streaming numbers. So far, no response.
Ouch. That sounds expensive.
Remind me again how much money that site makes?
Is there any other medium that could survive with running costs so far beyond revenue?
I doubt YouTube will ever make money but marketing wise for Google, it’s worth its weight in gold in my opinion.
Jon
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shaadaaaap jon…ur an idiot…..shadaaaapp!!!
Ok let us try to settle this. An average video on youtube (let us take a music video as they are among the most popular) is around 15-20mb. So every 50 streams uses 1gb of BW, every 1000 uses 20gb.
How much is Google paying per gb average? No one knows. But let us at least say that Google is treated more or less like a large ISP by other ISPs, due to the amount of network traffic it uses, and its own network infastructure. As such, and as is common other ISP’s, etc peer with Google at much much cheaper rates then a typical hosting company (even a large one) could ever obtain, and even cheaper then the end user (i.e. the hosting companies client ever sees).
But one thing is for sure if I can get $5 mbit hosting (which is a theoretical 320gb) and even $4 mbit hosting (this is decent bandwidth that isn’t oversold) and I have heard of other getting E1.60 bandwidth I think it is obvious Google can get it much cheaper? How cheap? I don’t know. But given their pull, their focus on technology and their relentless drive to lower costs/improve compression, etc I would guess it could be as lower as $2 mbit – perhaps someone with more knowledge can correct me. So if we assume they use up 300gb per mbit (youtube is a pretty global site) on an average 20mb music video (which runs 4 minutes) that equals 7 cents per thousand views. Yes thousand.
Now if estimates were that Google was making 200 million in revenue last year 08 and spending around 1 million a day with 3-4% of videos monetized. Please tell me how these same analyst now claim they are loosing half a billion this year? When any idiot can tell you in stream advertising is all over the place on youtube now days?
I would not be surprised if 15-20% of all video VIEWS on youtube are now monetized. Youtube has been pushing extremely hard – note the recent inclusion of featured videos in the recommended list.
Now if I myself can start a tube site (adult, mainstream, divx even streaming) and make profit monetizing 100% of my videos what % does Google have to monetize to make profit? On the downside they are sharing profits with creators and only monetizing a minority %. But on the upside they attract premium advertisers, they OWN the adsense network (so even with sharing profits it is no different to how I might run a tube site with adsense in which I am effectively sharing profits with Google albeit at a different % rate), they monetize search no youtube as only they know how and don’t share any profits there AND they undoubtedly have much much lower costs per GB of storage and transfer to me.
So with that in mind how far off can Google seriously be from break even with youtube? My honest opinion is not very far and perhaps that is why they are releasing more details? Who knows. But the truth is there is no way they are loosing anything like half a billion. Youtube will break even within the next year or two. And it will make profit. If I can start a tube and profit, God knows Google can even with the differing pros and cons.
very far.
Thanks for trying to talk logic here.
Think about that, then think that there are over 1 billion people active online… and THEN think that ironically there’re also 1.2 billion people chronically hungry in the world.
Imagine how easy it would be to help the hungry billion? http://bit.ly/16LaRN (you’d get….)
Tis annoying that there are never any exact numbers. Be easier if everyone owned up wouldnt it?
I hear Utopia is lovely in the Summer.
1 billion hits a day is a surprise even to this YouTube Power User. But then, I guess it should not be.
I have more than a few videos up there, have been uploading about 1 a week. In the vast YouTube universe, I am a nobody, and I am getting 5,000 hits per day on my videos. Many. many videos get that in an hour!
I just checked, on YouTube home page, the “Popular” category videos have hit numbers like 300,000, 500,000, and they were uploaded like 3 days ago.
More streams means more ads shown…
I have noticed more and more ads on USER-generated videos lately…
I believe that the much-quoted 3% number of total videos montized is just plain wrong…
Youtube is a very big source of traffic.That’s no doubt.If the traffic is 1billion, that means it was a very big market.
I know some people make money out of it.With annotations,and clouds feature from youtube, there is so much thing people can do to make money.
We should all be glad that Google own YouTube.
As there would have been no way on earth that YouTube would have survived if it stayed as an independent.
Google face a huge dilemma with YouTube today.
Although there must be great pride in owning the World’s biggest Online Video Library, the costs of running these daily Video Streams will never generate any profits for the Company.
But for now whilst it remains free and easy for all of us, we should all enjoy YouTube in its present glory.
They’ll never drop it, whilst money is a big issue, owning 90% of the average mans internet is priceless and they’d never forfeit that, even if youtube does in fact lose them 500mil/year.
Michael is back to ACTUAL blogging again. Cool.
And that pie chart is way over-sized..
There is a LOT happening on youtube. It’s not just popular videos. There are thousands of training videos, product reviews, and marketing material for products being published. It is a marketplace that is happening – Google could just flip the switch on the sales tools add-on tab any day and make some of the sales on the site, going through Google Checkout.
A billion video streams in a day are hugely impressive. I was reading up on another site, that Google was not equipped for the cloud computing model being implemented and now with these kinds of numbers estimated, all I have to say is that someone had really underestimated Google.
I know some people make money out of it.With annotations,and clouds feature from youtube, there is so much thing people can do to make money.
YOUTUBE always rocks. Google will maintain its top position for sure
I’m not necessarily surprised by those numbers. I probably watch upwards of 5 embedded YouTube videos alone every day. If I ever somehow end up on YouTube’s site, you can bet I’m not leaving without watching more than one video. Furthermore, I have friends (not me, of course) who sit and watch YouTube videos all day. I can imagine that those numbers would reflect that.
wow..that seems quite big
what about the monetization?i guess its the same.
1 billion stream a day, wondering how bigs their data center to store all videos..
lots and lots of junk traffic. wow, this may prove to be Google’s only mistake.
Seriously?
Who cares?
They are on track to lose more than 200 million this year? Would any normal business with no real plan of being cash flow positive stay alive like this?
Another perfect example of a failed tech company with mass adoption and no way to monetize……
If Google is paying for the hosting of You Tube videos, then they should have the legal right to charge a basic minimum for each video viewed irrespective. If this is the case, then perhaps this is the solution to the ongoing debate.
http://www.coms...Online_in_April
http://gmy.news....com/v/13880459
http://www.ripleys.com/
it’s a ripley, believe it or not lol
now I don’t know what happened to my post
I was only checking the links to see if they worked
I’ll wait awhile, if it don’t show up
I’ll spread the word, so you’ll have less post
to censor out lol
no big deal
Here this Bud’s for you lol
http://www.yout...h?v=2HWEXUzzmDY
348,557 views
Channel Views: 757
I was nevre really good at math and odds
it just amuses me lol
I think it’s a fairly reliable average estimate for YouTube-style content that video delivery costs are in the region of $0.25 to $0.50 per thousand videos streamed. This means the annual bandwidth costs of YouTube are in the region of $90M to $180M per year. For what it’s worth, this is completely consistent with what other video sites with their own CDNs are spending in the market.
I don’t think YouTube is burning that much money anymore. It is also the most phenomenal success on the web ever, and the value of its audience GROWS over time, not the opposite.
The CSFB analyst was trying to get some headlines but is COMPLETELY off. My dad once tried to estimate the toothpaste consumption of Europe by showing people pictures, and ended up overstimating the total market by 5X
Google is in the money on this one, just give it some time.
Is this counting an embedded video in a non-youtube page in which the viewer doesn’t actually choose to view the video as a streaming-hit on that video?
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yes youtube is making a lot but very useful.
Ah, ironically there’re also 1.2 billion people chronically hungry in the world.
Imagine if the online billion helped the hungry billion? http://bit.ly/16LaRN (you’d get….)