Tag Archives: online video

Calling BS on Wall Street’s YouTube Revenue Estimates

Posted by Todd Sawicki on July 9, 2008 View Comments

The recent WSJ article on Google’s difficulties monetizing YouTube has caught a lot of attention with the stat that Google can only sell ads around 4% of the videos on the site (due to copyright concerns).  With roughly a billion videos viewed a day that leaves a lot of unmonetized traffic.

At the same time as noted by SAI and Venturebeat, a bunch of silly and seemingly crack-smoking inspired revenue estimates were published by Wall Street analysts estimating YouTube’s 2008 revenue at around $200 million for 2008 and $350 to $400 million for next year.

As I noted in a recent post – the video ad market has a long way to go to be anything of significance.  Given Wall Street’s ability to hype hallucinogenic estimates I am not surprised to see those crazy numbers thrown out there.  But someone has to take a closer look and expose the crack smoking for what it is.

Let’s take a look – 4% of YouTube’s content is monetizable.  Let’s assume for a moment that 4% represents 10% of YouTube’s traffic – given the 1 billion videos viewed per day – that’s 100 million views.  YouTube is selling a new format – the video overlay with some estimates as high as a $20 cpm.  Now being in the ad business – I doubt very much that Google is actually getting anywhere close to $20 – real 30 second video ads are getting $20 CPM for essentially the equivalent of a 5-10 second banner-sized pop-up ad.

Let’s say Google sales force is good and they are getting a $10 cpm on what they can sell and let’s assume they are achieving a typical premium sell through of 30% of their inventory.  That means that they aren’t selling 100 million overlay ads per day that means they are selling 30 million.  At a $10 CPM that’s $300k per day, $9 million a month and just under a $100 million per year.  And given the amount of inventory – I highly doubt YouTube is seeing a 30% fill rate and a $10 eCPM a much more likely scenario is half that fill rate at half that CPM or $25 million a year.  Also as more inventory opens up to Google, the eCPM’s are likely to fall as the social networks have shown having a ton of inventory puts a lot of downward pressure on CPM’s.

Now a $25 to $100 million dollar a year business is nice especially for a business that’s not even 4 years old but I doubt that even covers YouTube’s bandwidth costs even at the high end of the estimate.

Online Video – Not Here Yet – How a Big Number isn’t really That Big

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 12, 2008 View Comments

Comscore (via Allen Stern at CenterNetwork) reports that 11.5 billion videos were watched online in March in the U.S.  11.5 billion sounds like an awfully big number.  But it’s not.  At least not in terms of web scale.  Comscore itself estimates that total page views online are estimated in the trillions per month.  Heck even my company, Lookery, a demographic-based ad network that’s less then a year old delivered almost 3 billion ads in April. It’s estimated that MySpace and Facebook combined do more then 100 billion page views a month.

And Comscore which likely undercounts pages views by a factor of 2 to 3x is OVERstating videos.  In their stats, they estimate the AVERAGE online user watches 83 videos a month!  Seriously.  Personally I can’t believe that stat.  I’m as addicted to the Internet as the next guy and I watch maybe 30 videos a month.  Maybe.

So even if you take Comscore’s numbers at face value, 11.5 billion isn’t that big of a number when you look at the economic size of the video market.  Assuming a range of $1 to $5 cpm and 1 ad per video (any format, method, size, style doesn’t really matter), you’re looking at a TOTAL market size of just $11.5 million to $57.5 million for all online video.  That’s out of a total online ad market of about $2 billion a month.

My point isn’t to say online video won’t be or isn’t important.  It’s more a comment about the incredibly large scale required to build a large media business or market.  The media business is about a little off a whole heck of a lot.  That’s why ads are priced in cost per thousands.  And the need to have immense scale also explains why the media business gravitates towards consolidation but that’s a post for another day.  When videos viewed starts approaching trillions then we’ll be somewhere.