YouTube’s head of content says the video giant has seen 50% annual growth in views for the last three years and that there’s plenty of room in the market for other players.
Online video is so hot right now, but YouTube, the grandfather of the industry, isn’t worried about being pushed aside.
In fact, Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s head of content, said the competition from Facebook and Twitter — “in the last 12 months every platform has decided that they want to add video” — is actually helpful to YouTube.
“I think you are seeing tremendous validation of the market,” Kyncl said during an on-stage interview Wednesday at the Code/Media conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, Calif., “and we are just happy to be part of it.”
Kyncl said there’s room for many large players in what he believes to be a $200-$400 billion market and said YouTube is thriving, with year over year growth in video views at 50% for the last three years.
More than 50% of those views are coming on mobile devices, he said, traffic that has produced yearly mobile revenue growth of 100%.
“There are only a couple of companies that are growing as fast as we are at the scale we are,” Kyncl said. “We expected a deceleration of the business and it is actually accelerating.”
Kyncl emphasized that YouTube alone among video platforms returns a majority of revenue to content creators. He said 15 million partners receive checks from the network.
And YouTube is making an effort to reward its most popular creators at a higher rate. Last quarter it introduced Google Preferred, a program that enables advertisers to target the top 5% of YouTube content with ads that can’t be skipped. Kyncl said creators in the program are seeing 70% annual revenue growth, compared to 50% for YouTube overall.
About The Author
Martin Beck is Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, covering the latest news for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. He spent 24 years with the Los Angeles Times, serving as social media and reader engagement editor from 2010-2014. A graduate of UC Irvine and the University of Missouri journalism school, Beck started started his career at the Times as a sportswriter and copy editor.
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