Day after day, the entertainment industry at large puts out articles touting that YouTube is destroying television with regards to the ultra coveted 18-49 year old market. In fact, YouTube is watched by that group more than any cable channel, which includes HBO. But that’s not too shocking right? What the hell is on TV that’s worth watching even? Those shows are terrible.
And yet, YouTube still can’t draw those monster budgets for original programming like television can. And the reason for that is TIME.
This guy and his Viet Nam buddies are screwing you out of big budget YouTube shows.
Yup, those four little words stand in the way of YouTube’s overwhelming success, they are the penultimate to YouTube standing atop the money mountain. And no, I am not talking about Time magazine.
According to YouTube’s Chief Business Officer Omid Kordestani, the average user now watches YouTube for 40 minutes in a session. According to Nielsen ratings company, the average person now uses their internet and social media roughly two and a half hours a day. That’s a lot, right? Well the average user on television watches for five hours a day! That’s 380 minutes — or 9.5 times the amount they watch YouTube.
That’s 9.5 times as long to hit them with ads and sell them on products that fund the shows and bring in the big money budgets.
YouTube is going up though — it’s up more than 50 percent from last year and looking to double again by next year. And television is falling. But it’s still got a long way to fall. And YouTube has a long way to climb before these two pass each other.
But it’s going to happen.
Not shocked by the fact that young people watch Youtube more than they watch cable. Cable TV has become a wasteland for much older audiences and if it’s not reality shows, it’s boring as hell award bait shown almost exclusively on Sunday nights. No matter how badly AMC tries to spin the numbers, kids are NOT watching Breaking Bad or Mad Men or the other pretentious crap they win awards for.