The Attention Economy: How to Use YouTube Better
This is a post from Music Industry Blog.
This is the third in the series of posts exploring how the music industry can better leverage the potential of the YouTube economy. You can see the first post here and the second here.
Short form video is accelerating at a rapid pace, racking up 4.2 trillion views in the first half 2015. While challengers Facebook, Snapchat and others now account for just over half of that total, few platforms of scale yet provide content creators and owners comparable ability to build engaged audiences and income. For music the situation is even more pronounced – no other platform is even on the same lap of the race (and I include Vevo as an extension of YouTube). YouTube is the most popular online music destination by far (46% of consumers use it regularly) and its role for Digital Natives cannot be exaggerated – 65% of US under 25’s use YouTube for music regularly.
But the share that regularly watch YouTube as a whole is even higher: 76%. The added complexity is that most artists and labels do not feel that YouTube is pulling its weight in revenue terms. Free music streamers – of which YouTube is the largest single component – comprise 92.5% of all music streaming users and just 32% of all streaming revenue. Yet a whole generation of non-music creators like PewDiePie, Smosh and the Janoskians have via YouTube built audiences and income that most artists could only dream of. So what’s the secret?