Friday, June 30, 2006

The logic of YouTube's numbers

By now, most people have heard of YouTube and its extraordinary growth in popularity. According to the latest stats, 50 million clips are downloaded every day on their site. Sounds like a lot but what does it really mean.

Thinking about it, I decided to compare YouTube to the top television shows on American broadcast TV. The Nielsen ratings measure how many households watch a particular TV show during every week.

So suppose, Youtube was a TV show which showed nothing but cool clips. Lets say it was a weekly hour-long show, which only has 42 minutes of programming (wikipedia). By my own estimate, the average "popular" clip on Youtube is 150secs so an hour-long program would be able to show 17 clips.

At 50 million clips a day or 350 million clips per week, that is equal to 20.5 million viewer-hours a week. Now for a little bit of guestimating ... In the Nielsen rating system, the US has 110 million households. Even though there's 300 million people in the US, lets say only 250 million could watch TV (except the very old, very young, etc).

That means 1 household = 2.27 viewers and YouTube's 20.5 million viewer hours comes out to 9 million households. That would put it right between 'American Inventor' and '24'

17 DEAL OR NO DEAL 3/22(S) NBC 8:00PM
Wed
8.9 14.0 9,806,000
18 CBS NCAA POST GUN SU 2(S) CBS 7:31PM
Sun
8.5 15.0 9,353,000
19 24 FOX 9:00PM
Mon
8.3 12.0 9,160,000
20 AMERICAN INVENTOR ABC 9:00PM
Thu
8.0 12.0 8,783,000
*from Yahoo Nielsen ratings


The conclusion is that if the entire YouTube Network was a single TV show it would barely be in the top 20. It is growing fast, but it has a long ways to go before it will overtake any TV network.