• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, November 6, 2013

Big Internet-branded live music shows seemingly can’t beat regular old TV. The YouTube Music Awards pulled in only 800,000 plus “views” for its live views, according to Ad Age. YouTube did some marketing, including in-feed ads on Tumblr, a Promoted Trend on Twitter, and promotion on its own home page.

Still, it wasn’t an all-out affair.  For example, there wasn’t a budget for TV media (MTV, perhaps?) as far as we can tell.

YouTube can pull more than 10 million-plus views for music clips.  Miley Cyrus's "Wrecking Ball,"  for one, grabbed 173 million views.

One thing was certain: the YouTube Music Awards wasn’t like any MTV awards show -- either in raw numbers or production values or. YouTube’s defense is that it’s only in the early stages of live shows.

Perhaps YouTube should have considered broader reach by syndicating the show through other platforms rather than running it only on YouTube.

While YouTube’s awards had 250,000 viewers Sunday night, CBS had 14.35 million, NBC 12.6 million, ABC 6.06 million, Fox 4.26 million,  and Univision, 3.36 million. We don’t have any cable network data yet, but the top 15 or so cable networks typically average from 1 million viewers  to 2.5 million viewers.

MTV’s most recent awards show, the Video Music Awards in August, pulled in 10.1 million viewers. That featured Cyrus’ now-noted scandalous performance.

While Netflix doesn’t release viewing data, we can also be assured that “House of Cards,” its original piece of Internet content, has done much better than the YouTube Music Awards.

Kia Motors’s youth-targeted Soul brand was the major sponsor of the YouTube show. Don’t worry. At some quarter of a million viewers for a 90-minute show, marketers won’t be leaving traditional TV in droves.

That said, artists performing on the YouTube show weren’t too shabby; they included Lady Gaga and Eminem.

So was all this a misfire?