YouTube Keeps Growing, but for How Long?
In case you hadn’t noticed YouTube.com’s something big, and I mean really big. The latest news from the video-sharing upstart turned market leader/creator that they serve more than 100 million videos a day shows just how big the phenomenon this company helped spark has become.
That number of 100 million is basically double the traffic the site supported just a couple of months ago, and YouTube expects to see this ramp up to continue at this torrid pace moving into the future. "We do not see growth slowing down any time soon, especially as more people are gaining access to broadband networks and digital devices that play video are becoming more advanced," says Julie Supan, YouTube’s director of marketing.
But it’s not just YouTube that’s experiencing healthy growth, as demand for all user-generated content continues an upward trend. "The most important thing to note is how much the category is still growing," says LeAnn Prescott, senior analyst at Hitwise, an online competitive intelligence service that polls ISPs for information on Internet traffic to a wide variety of sites. In late May, Hitwise released data that showed a 164% increase in traffic to the top ten video sites over the three month period of March to May.
The two big challenges facing YouTube and its competitors now are sustaining that growth over coming months and, even more importantly, settling on business models that will allow them to actually monetize what until now has been a fad that’s, in financial terms at least, all sizzle and no steak.
Expanding Capabilities
YouTube's strategy to help keep their traffic expanding is to build upon the strengths that put them where they are. "YouTube has experience extraordinary growth since we launched because of the innovative new platform and community we have built around video entertainment," says a YouTube spokeperson.
Over the last couple of months, YouTube has expanded the capabilities of that platform in a number of interesting ways, although arguably with mixed results as to their incremental impact on maintaining the site’s near-term growth. Here’s a brief overview of those enhancements.
Channels
Further blurring the lines between traditional TV and online video, YouTube’s introduced the ability for publishers to create channels of their content. "Video content creators, be it user-generated or professional content, are becoming the online broadcasters, record labels, and movie studios of tomorrow," says Supan. "Channels give them the ability to control and share entertainment—a privilege long enjoyed only by traditional media."