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Heaton: A graph is worth a thousand words about YouTube

Posted by Steve Safran on February 8, 2007

Below, an Alexa graph Terry Heaton generated that speaks plenty about the mistake Viacom is making by pulling its video from YouTube. Viacom is missing out on the massive reach of YouTube by its shortsighted power play. When you pull clips from YouTube, you don’t get them at your site. You just lose them, period. And you lose all the free marketing you were getting, along with the goodwill of your most passionate audience members. Take a look at the relative reach of YouTube (red line) versus ComedyCentral.com (blue line):

Writes Terry: “There has been no appreciable growth in the comedycentral.com site since Viacom yanked its videos, so what’s the point? Clearly, Viacom isn’t betting that people will flock to its site, because they won’t. NBC learned this lesson in the winter of 2005-2006, when it demanded YouTube pull the Lazy Sunday clip from Saturday Night Live. Their argument at the time was that people would come to the nbc.com site to watch the clips. They didn’t.”

  • Anonymous

    LR seems to do a lot of image hotlinking. Weren’t you ever told that’s bad form?

  • Echy

    Is his assumption that everyone on YouTube is watching Comedy Central videos? Because that is what he is trying to prove.

  • thehartfordchannel

    i don’t think that’s what “he is trying to prove”. i think he is saying you’d have a better chance of having your stuff seen (and enjoyed) on a site that gets traffic… which clearly comedycentraldotcom does not.

    perhaps IF viacom promoted the damn thing it would, but the SOP of denying the inevitable only worked for about 5 years.

    cuban’s broadcast(dot)com was the wake-up call no one paid much attention to.

  • http://www.lostremote.com Cory

    Hey anonymous, Steve linked an image from his coworkers blog: not in bad form.

  • http://www.lostremote.com Steve Safran

    Correct. Linked with permission and credit.

  • thomas

    why create content if you’re not going to get paid for it? i doubt any of these big corps are doing it because they like to actually entertain people, so unless they get $$$ in return they will send you a nice big FU letter

  • MSM

    If “Honest Abe” were around today, he’d put it this way:

    Two years and 11 months ago, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim brought forth on this continent a new website, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that it’s OK to make billions with everyone else’s copyrighted content. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that website, or any other website so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.

  • invitedmedia

    youtube is simply milking it as long as they can. they’ll add some technology to keep them just this side of the courthouse door.

    if they can turn the conversation around; media companies working to make deals with them rather than the current one having the destination of choice making the overtures, they’d do far better.

    question for MSM: if “you” had a property that a whopping majority of users frequent, what would “you” charge to have someone put their content on it???

    BTW- wasn’t the real honest abe a almond joy lover?

  • MSM

    question for invited: if “you” were the one creating the content that actually drove that “whopping majority of users” to someone else’s site, how much would “you” charge the site to let them continue to display your content?

  • invitedmedia

    your question is flawed. the “whopping majority of users” have been shown to view far more video that is not “lazy sunday” stuff.

    an earlier commentor tried to tie the two together as well.

    if your premise stood alone, common sense would dictate that when lazy sunday was pulled from you tube (which i don’t think anyone accussed the fine folks of you tube as posting) numbers at nbcdotcom would have had an immediate increase. i think the proof is they did not.

    it’s an interesting question though. one i’m not qualified to answer.

    i can imagine youtube is loving the free publicity though.

    how much is “MSM” charging for that?

  • http://www.marketersstudio.com David Berkowitz

    While Viacom may be missing YouTube’s reach, does that mean it shouldn’t try to encourage some brand loyalty and capture those visitors? When someone views a Comedy Central clip on a Viacom-owned site, that viewer is much more valuable than the passing flock on YouTube, where YouTube gets to build the relationship.

  • Safran

    There is nothing hard about this argument, and I won’t even include my opinion if that will help. Here are the two sides:

    A. YouTube steals from our audience and makes money we should be getting.

    B. YouTube is a terrific marketing tool that reaches an audience beyond what we could, gets incremental eyeballs and drives traffic to our shows and site.

    Heaton argues B. Viacom argues A.

    Networks spend millions promoting themselves. YouTube is a free marketing tool. Agree or disagree with A or B. Them’s the facts.

  • http://www.allyourtv.com Rick Ellis

    Steve–

    There is an option C. to the arguement. Assuming that Viacom’s real issue is that they can’t easily monitize the video clips if they’re on YouTube, then another option would be to offer up the clips to any site that wants them, with a short pre-roll ad the beginning of the video.

    That option offers them some fraction of the YouTube audience, and the ad inventory they need.

    That option only works, however, if Viacom is aggressive in promoting it, make it easier to implement for everyone, and makes the clips available as soon as the clips air.

  • http://www.danceteria.com Havelock Holmes

    Believe there is outrage at the fortune the YouTube founders realized, and this, as much as rational business logic, is one reason for the counterstrike. This, of course, doesn’t mean that the counterstrike will produce the desired result.

  • Steve LaRue

    #14, good observation.

    although i’m beginning to think they sold too cheap.

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