Commentary
How Rich Is That? Top 1,000 YouTube Channels Average $23K in Advertising a Month
- by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, June 20, 2013
The really hard thing to get your hands around about YouTube video is, in the big picture, just how many people see how many sites and how that plays out in dollars. Using a variety of sources, a new infographic from MDG Advertising puts a lot of data, culled from all over, into an overwhelmingly positive perspective.
One that got my attention is that the top 1,000 YouTube channels bring in an average of $23,000 a month in ad revenue. And using that same 1,000-channel base, according to data Boca Raton and New York-based MDG culled for its blog, those channels elicit 25 million comments, 55 million “like” ratings per month and 350 social interactions per minute of video.
Those figures are impressive, but the ad revenue has got to be a little glass half-full proposition. On the one hand, YouTube channels don’t replenish content very often, so maybe that revenue figure is ample (and obviously it gets way fatter when factoring just the top 10). On the other hand, for the first time, it does seem understandable that top channels may have a point when they complain YouTube’s trickle-down payday is not all that awesome.
And when you consider all the other advertising on all the other YouTube channels, an observer begins to wonder just how great some of these stats are. What happens with the hundreds of thousands of ads that are on the sites that don’t fall in the “Top 1,000” list? How much ad revenue, or consumer attention, are those channels getting?
In fact, though, part of what fascinates me about online video “research” like this is how much digital ad firms need to point out to advertisers that they need to be on YouTube seemingly more than they need to be in the digital space overall. MDG points out, for big advertisers, there’s been a big pay off. “These video campaigns have delivered impressive results, with the top 500 brands on the platform averaging 884,000 monthly views and 35,000 subscribers,” the MDG blog post says. The takeaway: You’d be a fool not to be there. And it’s hard to dissent when you see the figures—YouTube is not an 800-pound gorilla but a family of them, and this latest propaganda tool does a neat job of giving highlights of the family tree.
pj@mediapost.com
P.J. Bednarski has written for MediaPost since 2012 on media and marketing topics. He can be reached at pj@mediapost.com
Interesting. $23K isn't all that exciting. But it's early. What strikes though is that the FUD sale (casting fear, uncertainty, and doubt) via "you need to be on....." does major disservice to advertisers. In fact, in the digital space we should be concerned that "should be" is all that's offered. Not all companies should be using video as a primary took. It all depends on your marketing. But the FUD sell indicates weakness more than it indicates strength...