Has YouTube Peaked or Just Become More Honest?

When all of us were writing last fall about YouTube being purchased by Google for $1.65 billion in stock, part of that mantra was YouTube’s traffic consisting of users viewing 100 million videos per day. Thousands of news stories and blogs mentioned that same 100 million number. This number came, in part, from Nielsen NetRatings, which counts the number of unique visitors to YouTube.com, but YouTube, itself, was evidently responsible for the actual 100 million videos-per-day calculation as well as saying “We continue to grow exponentially month-to-month, so check back in for the latest metrics.”

Checking back in for the latest metrics as they suggest, we find the now Google-owned YouTube is suddenly claiming only 70 million videos downloaded per day (though the 100 million figure continues to be used on the YouTube web page). This is in all the stories today from Davos where YouTube founder Chad Hurley announced to the World Economic forum that YouTube will shortly begin paying contributors for videos that are successful on the site.

So what has changed at YouTube? Has traffic really declined? Has YouTube peaked? Or were the earlier numbers juiced to make the company look even more successful than it actually was, thus encouraging the Google deal?

Nobody knows these answers for sure who doesn’t work at YouTube or Google, but the few statistics we can put together raise some serious questions. One can argue that Alexa.com numbers aren’t necessarily a true mirror of the net as a whole, but they are available and the probably show general trends. Well Alexa says YouTube is growing, not shrinking, in both total viewers and page views-per-user.

There are many possible reasons for this decline in traffic. Maybe YouTube is rejecting more videos more quickly under pressure from industry trade groups. Maybe sites like Revver that have been paying video contributors all along are siphoning YouTube growth. Or maybe, as suggested above, the original figure of 100 million downloads was simply incorrect and a slightly more adult Google-owned YouTube decided to correct the number and hoped nobody would notice.

Except we did.

By the way, the exponent for growth from 100 million to 70 million videos per day is approximately 0.9806357.

so it doesn'treallymean that there are1oomillion views per day .. ? is that number appropriate for all users of Youtube worldwide .. ?

So the essence of this story is Bob asking a question and then not really answering it:

Is A true?
Is B true?
If A is true, is it because X is true?
Or, if B is true, is it because Y is true?
Or is it really the UFO aliens?

Not exactly Pulizer prize winning journalism. Where are Bob's vaunted industry inside sources? He can predict Google forming its own Internet G but he can't figure out whether U2B is getting bigger or smaller?

From my own personal experience, I will go way out on a limb and say that as new people discover U2B it gets bigger, but as they watch for a while and the novelty wears off and they realise how bad it really is, they watch less and less. So it's where those two trendlines intersect that determines the specific slope at a specific time. Why? Because most folks aren't very talented.

Comments

1. Posted by: Benjamin J. Higginbotham on January 29, 2007 10:22 AM:

What about the metric they used to measure the views? Is a view a click on a video? Does YouTube count the embedded players on MySpace and whatnot as a view even if a user does not actually click play, they only load the initial image embed? What counts as a view? Do we actually know what they mean by 'view'?

Couldn't it be that Google is simply changing the metric? As an example, rather than counting all page loads, they only count when a video is actually played for 5 seconds or more. I doubt this is the case as the numbers would probably be a bit more dramatic, but you get the idea.

I think the bigger issue here is not that the number went down, but we have no idea what the numbers actually mean. 100 millions views. 70 million views. What is a view?

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