YouTube Streams 1 Billion Videos a Day

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 from Google (GOOG), is above 1 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.

Original post

Comments

[LA Tech:]

How much $$ is Google losing from YouTube every single day?

Jun 09 11:07 AM

[jack dee:]

one reason they may wish to stay low key, is that the ISPs are picking up the tab on a lot of this.

At some point verzion and the boys might turn around a say Monopoly to the justice dept. In fact it might well be a race between the US and the EU to see who is setting the enforcment standard. Google might well find itself fighting on both sides of the pond.

Jun 09 12:59 PM

[Fighthunger:]

Ah, ironically there’re also 1.2 billion people chronically hungry in the world.

Imagine if the online billion helped the hungry billion? bit.ly/16LaRN (you’d get….)

Oct 09 04:23 AM