Unhappy Eighth Birthday, YouTube

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) YouTube, which was founded eight years ago, has barely changed, except for the number videos posted at the site. It brings in almost no revenue for the search company, and its content remains dominated by low-resolution amateur video. In nearly a decade, YouTube has not grown up at all.

In a blog post about the eighth year anniversary, the “YouTube” Team bragged:

Today, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s more than four days of video uploaded each minute! Every month, more than 1 billion people come to YouTube to access news, answer questions and have a little fun. That’s almost one out of every two people on the Internet.

Movie and TV studios are not adding content at anywhere near that rate. The figure only proves that short clips from people who have no interest in premium video remain the biggest part of the site’s inventory, and the part that is growing fastest.

YouTube’s numbers are hugely impressive. Google video sites, made up almost exclusively of YouTube, had 153.9 million unique visitors in March, according to research firm comScore. No other sites where even close. Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) had the largest figure among the portals with 50.3 million visitors in March. Another contrast is that visitors to YouTube watched an average of 1,202.6 minutes in March. For Yahoo! the comparable number was 59.1 minutes.

YouTube’s advantage among its competitors ends with size. The video content at Yahoo!, AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) is almost all professionally produced. Advertisers are happy to run marketing messages next to or in this content. YouTube has some movie trailers on its home page. It also has content there that includes “How to Disappoint Your Parents in 61 Seconds” and “The Disgusting Little Things That People Do.” Among those things is watching disgusting videos on YouTube.

Happy birthday.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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