Management at Viacom (VIA) property IFILM is making the case that they may not need YouTube. IFILM already has video-sharing features, video blogs, films, video ads, and TV. The video site has about 13 million unique visitors a month, according to the company. The combination of Viacom’s sites ranked No. 12 in the US with 37.3 million unique users in January, according to Comscore. This puts it well ahead of several other media conglomerate including Disney (DIS) with 25 million unique visitors, CBS (CBS) with 22.6 million and NBC Universal with 15 million.
Granted, YouTube has about 80 million unique visitors per month, and Metacafe has about 35 million, but the major content holders have troubles with these sites due to their lack of screening for premium content. In essence, the large content holders believe that the Google’s (GOOG) YouTube audience was built on the back of their property.
There has been a great deal of speculation that Fox (NWS), Viacom (VIA) and NBC (GE) might set up their own competitor to YouTube. What is not so obvious is that they may already have the platform, and base audience, for this in IFILM. If so, getting a joint venture off the ground to give YouTube a run for its money may not be as difficult as it first seemed.
Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
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