Interesting piece of analysis from OpenSlate/VentureBeat on the earning power of the top YouTube channels. Number 2 in the list is the Taylor Swift Vevo channel with what seems an impressive 341m video views per month or 4Bn (!?!) views a year. Whilst impressive numbers, they then go on to estimate that this usage earns only £2.7m annually. This beautifully encapsulates their issue and the problem they’re causing the rest of the industry. For that amount of usage, you really need to be generating more revenue. And more importantly, whilst you carry on growing your usage without a decent monetisation model, you’re impacting on other businesses who do generate good revenue and profit for themselves, the rights owners and the artist talent. After all, it’s really not that hard to give away great content like this.
By way of comparison, it’s interesting that Vevo reported in 2013 that in the UK they had a total of 2.6Bn views, less than the 4Bn views to Taylor’s own channel [granted the UK number is 2013 and Taylor is 2014 – they clearly will have grown and i’ll update these stats once they report fully on 2014].
During the same period (2013), we at Box TV played a total of 3.3Bn videos to our viewers (we work this out by combining our playlist and BARB data) generating a top line income of £35m with a decent chunk of profit – now there’s a business!!
We have some new better stats for 2014 that we’ll release soon. I’ll pop them up here once we’re done but we’re still #1 in TV and i’d even guess that we’re still going to be the largest outlet for music video in the UK, bar none!