YouTube's first live streaming event

YouTube is set to host its first live streaming event Saturday, as it seeks new ways to capitalize on its enormous audience. The event, YouTubeLive!, will feature commentary from popular YouTube stars like Michael Buckley, the Hollywood Reporter, and performances from recording artists such as Katy Perry and Black Eyed Peas member Will.i.am.

Will.i.am's "Yes We Can" online-only music video was one of the top viewed videos on YouTube this year, and Katy Perry, of "I Kissed a Girl" fame, is active on her own YouTube channel. Buckley started dishing about celebrity gossip and scandals two years ago, and has since attracted a regular audience of nearly 6 million viewers to his YouTube program.

YouTube only distributed a couple hundred tickets to the event in an attempt to draw viewers online. The video-sharing site selected the performers and hosts from polls of its users. YouTube marketer Chris DiCesare said the slate of personalities selected for the event have garnered more than 2.5 billion hits for their videos.

YouTube will provide multiple streams of the event to allow viewers to customize their experience and follow their personal favorites more closely.

Live event streaming is one of the potential growth areas for online video that has been exploited more in a broadcast-centric model to this point. Live online events have tremendous upsides in lower production cost and proven distribution channels, but the question remains how to make them a profitable addition to an online video site's repertoire.

Sponsorships leap to mind as one excellent way to find a mutual benefit for site and advertisers, as a huge built-in audience will see specific branding for an extended period. Ads obviously could run alongside the streams, but it seems as if such an innovative model deserves a more innovative approach to marketing.

Rest assured Google is parsing all of these options to try to figure out how to turn YouTube's 44 percent market share into the same sort of monetization ratio that Hulu is getting with just 1 percent market share (comScore figures). 

For more:
- the San Jose Mercury News has an article 

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