We have earlier covered Google’s effort’s to make sense out of it’s youtube investment and a spending of more than $1.6 million a day, now the news is that the efforts are bearing fruits and Google is about to breakeven on youtube this year.
Gautam Anand, Director – Content Partnership at Google said
We are definitely happy with the progress we have made. For one and half years after Google acquired YouTube, we concentrated on building traffic. It’s clear that was the right strategy, considering how big and diverse the site and audience is now – with over one billion views globally and 24 hours of video uploaded every minute.
Some contemplated numbers on the same are:
Brandon Witz of XYHD.tv questioning the earlier estimated $1.6 million/day youtube costs and did some analysis on the same. Brandon estimates that apart from the amortization costs of content from it’s partners the estimated fixed costs that youtube bears are
| Bandwidth | $100,000 |
| Content Acquisition | $236,000 |
| Revenue Sharing | $66,000 |
| Administrative Costs | $252,054 |
| Data Center Costs | $36,000 |
putting Google a daily cost of $694 K on paper and with around $240 Million a year in revenues , The company is probably moving towards breakeven on it’s youtube investment.
note: the numbers are of 2009 estimates.
Youtube to focus on bollywood content
Adding to the efforts to make Youtube profitable ,the company is moving Youtube from just user generated content to partnerships with content providers and this is quite apparent in it’s latest stint with Indian Premier League which lead it’s traffic grow 25% MoM. Apart from this Google reportedly has over 10,000 content partners and the number is still growing and the company is increasingly focusing on bollywood for the content. Gauatm Anand said ,
“Bollywood is one of the big focus areas for us. The recent premier of the movie ‘Striker’ on YouTube was the first time a mainstream Bollywood movie was released on YouTube on the same day of its theatre release. The movie has already seen close to a million views outside of India and is an early model for how Bollywood studios can distribute their content abroad. We also recently concluded the streaming of IPL matches on YouTube, which got over 54 million channel views worldwide.”
as quoted on exchange4media.
