Have to give some props to Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget over at Internet Outsider for his post about YouTube and the recent stats from Vidmeter (PDF link here). Seems content from the almighty Viacom only accounted for about two per cent of YouTube’s traffic — and all of the removed content from Big Media accounted for a measly six per cent of the total. So much for the argument about “NewTube” — the joint venture between News Corp. and Viacom — eviscerating YouTube by taking all the valuable content away. As Valleywag says, it’s the kittens who should be suing.
Update: Pete Cashmore at Mashable has a fair point when he notes that the Vidmeter report looked only at the videos that had been removed from the site, so it might not be a statistically accurate portrayal of what is on YouTube — since not everyone has been as aggressive as Viacom about sending takedown notices (to be fair to Vidmeter, they note that in their report).
Still, food for thought. Liz Gannes has some thoughts on the subject over at NewTeeVee. And here’s more food for thought: the 6,700 or so videos that Vidmeter included in their sample — the most-viewed — generated more than 1.58 billion views in a little over three months.
Update:
Kyle Redinger, among others (including a commenter here) takes issue with the Vidmeter survey. And Henry Blodget has a response to some of those criticisms — which Viacom also made in a recent Reuters story — in an update on his blog.