YouTube's Content Budget is 1/50th of Time Warner's. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes took the stage at Business Insider’s IGNITION conference earlier this week to talk shop with Henry Blodget about, among other topics, the online entertainment industry. Bewkes, who was fundamental in HBO’s rise to become the preeminent premium cable network (having served as CFO, then President and COO, and then CEO during his almost 20 year stint at the company) before taking the helm at Time Warner to oversee Turner Broadcasting, Warner Bros., New Line Cinema, Time Inc., HBO, and more from the multimedia conglomerates laundry list of assets, knows a thing or two about content. And given his current position and pedigree, his take on the state and trajectory of the industry is particularly noteworthy.
Regarding Netflix, Bewkes doesn’t think it’s a competitor to entertainment entities like HBO, but complementary. “Just to put it in perspective,” Bewkes said, “Well, we’re doing $5 billion a year in production on our networks and TV businesses, so…welcome.” Need A Studio? YouTube Opens Second Creator Space In Los Angeles. Hey all you creators out there: if the many collaborations we’ve seen between YouTube stars are any indication, it’s clear that working near other online video producers is a good way to get the creative juices flowing. Spending time around like minded individuals allows for a collaborative community that enhances everyone’s work. YouTube understands the importance of such a community. Earlier this year, the video sharing giant launched an official creator space in London; the massive studio features state-of-the-art video and audio equipment, easy access to a green screen, a large editing suite, and plenty of room to get some work done.
Thanks to the success of that endeavor, the YouTube Creator Support team has opened up a second creator space, this time in the entertainment capital of the world, Los Angeles. YouTube could’ve been content to sit back and make boatloads of cash off of cat videos. We Now Watch 4 Billion Hours of YouTube Videos Per Month. YouTube users now watch more than four billion hours of video through the site each month. For those of you keeping score at home, that's 456,000 years of cat videos, sports highlights, TED Talks and other content per month. Or, the equivalent of watching the original Nyan Cat video about 66 billion times. First reported as a casual mention in a Wall Street Journal article earlier this week, a YouTube spokesperson confirmed the number to Mashable on Wednesday.
And things are moving fast with the video sharing giant — the company just announced in May that users were watching a piddling three billion hours of footage per month. That page also reports that YouTube users upload 72 hours of content to the site every minute. While YouTube may be best known its viral videos, the Google subsidiary has recently been experimenting with more original and professionally produced channels as a way to attract even more viewers — and ad dollars. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ozgurdonmaz. YouTube: “We are to cable what cable was to broadcast” We want TV-sized audiences for our original programming, and we’re prepared to promote big like TV.
That was the essential message from top Google executives at the company’s star-studded “NewFront” presentation to advertisers at New York’s Beacon Theatre Wednesday night, as they unveiled yet more original programming channels for their YouTube platform, as well as an ambitious $200 million promotional campaign on YouTube and Google’s Display Network to draw viewers to the shows. With ad-industry trades including Ad Age and Adweek on hand to witness musical performances by Jay-Z, Flo Rida, Miri Bin-Ari and Neon Trees, top Google executives, including executive chairman Eric Schmidt and YouTube global content chief Robert Kyncl (seen above flanked by actresses Virginia Madsen and Jennifer Beals) laid out an expensive dog-and-pony show for advertisers that looked a lot like your standard springtime network TV “upfront” presentation.
“We learned from TV,” Kyncl said. More new channels. Demand and Google leave farm fight behind with “premium” YouTube channels. It was only about 14 months ago that Google made headlines for targeting Demand Media with algorithmic pesticides, classifying the Santa Monica, Calif. -based company’s freelancer-produced content as farmed material created specifically to game its search engines. Contrast this with Wednesday’s launch of Demand’s latest “premium” video channel on Google’s YouTube platform, eHow Pets. Overnight, Demand seems to have evolved from pestilent content farm into trusted partner, with YouTube now funding three Demand-produced video channels through its premium content initiative. Demand Media has been programming content from its legions of video bloggers on YouTube since 2007, and now touts a total audience of more than 7 million unique users on the platform per month, with over 3.6 billion views, according to comScore.
Sure, these are not A-list talents, but they’re not laid-off newspaper writers filing stories for $15 a pop out of their apartments, either.