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Yahoo! sees big gain in videos streamed

Pete Wylie — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:13:27 -0400

Yahoo! moved into second place in number of videos streamed with 56 percent growth in September, displacing Fox Interactive, according to NieslenOnline figures. Google's YouTube retained its headlock on the top spot by a mile in September, clocking 5.3 billion streams, or 20 times Yahoo!'s 265 million streams. It's the first time YouTube, the user-generated short-form video behemoth, has streamed more than 5 billion videos in a month.

As always, critics point to YouTube's struggle to sell ads around its content, especially as it uses more and more bandwidth and server capacity that is not free. On the other hand, most of Yahoo!'s streams are ad-supported so there's a growing revenue -- ah -- stream coming in.

It wasn't a good month for the rest of the top five in total streams, as Fox Interactive (last month's second-leading streamer), MSN/Windows Live, and Nickelodeon, respectively, all had double digit percentage declines in total video streamed.

For more:
- see the Beet.tv article here

SPOTLIGHT: YouTube increases market share

Pete Wylie — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:46:44 -0400

YouTube continued to widen its enormous lead in the online video space, claiming 49 percent of all online video views in July. Its eight closest competitors, like Yahoo!, AOL and Veoh, all lost fractions of their market shares to YouTube.

YouTube's share increased 1.8 percent from May and 8.1 percent from the same month last year.

The online video sharing site, purchased by Google last year, also increased its unique monthly visitor count. Looks like smooth sailing ahead for YouTube, especially after last week's favorable Veoh and Paramount court cases.

For more:
- see the metrics at seekingalpha.com

SPOTLIGHT: Young girls tuning out Olympics

Pete Wylie — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:07:18 -0400

For all the hype about NBC's unprecedented online video coverage of the Olympics, and the massive ratings they have seen so far, there is one major demographic slipping through the cracks.

According to a MediaLife story, fewer girls aged 12 to 17 are tuning in to the 2008 Olympics than tuned in to the 2004 Olympics in Athens.

While overall viewership is up 14 percent from Athens, rating for teenage and tween girls fell 11 percent. It's an interesting point to note for advertisers attempting to reach this choice demographic.

For more:
- MediaLife reports on missing Olympic-watching teenage girls.

Turner and Yahoo sport up

Doug Mohney — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:42:56 -0400

Turner Broadcasting System and Yahoo have cut a multi-year deal on advertising and sports content involving basketball, golf, and race cars.

Under the agreement, Turner will exclusively handle online ad sales for the NBA, golf, and NASCAR pages of Yahoo. In exchange, Yahoo Sports gets access to Turner basketball, golf, and NASCAR content from NBA.com, PGATOUR.com, PGA.com and NASCAR.com, including live and on-demand video, leaderboards and editorial content.

The deal puts together one of the leaders in sports media and the No. 1 online sports destination. All display, sponsorship and video advertising opportunities within the NBA, golf and NASCAR pages on Yahoo Sports will be available exclusively through the Turner Network. In addition, the deal also provides Turner with access to "advanced targeting technologies" that will allow Turner to exclusively sell advertisements based on a consumer's attraction to NASCAR, golf and NBA content.

Yahoo is promoting the deal as part of its new publisher strategy that it started to implement in October 2007, working with "differentiated" publishers to build an independent reseller network. Regardless, the announcement is unlikely to make Mr. Icahn happy.

For more:
- Yahoo/Turner partnership announcement

Related articles:
Veoh Adds ABC & ESPN
Take me out to the ball game (and Stanley Cup)

Yahoo Syndicates CBS

Doug Mohney — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:18:35 -0400

Yahoo has announced a distribution agreement with CBS Interactive, making Yahoo! the latest and greatest distribution partner of the CBS Audience Network.

In the deal, Yahoo TV will gain access to (i.e. syndication rights) to CBS's catalog of content with all those full episodes and hours of (broadcast) network programming. CBS's content will be added to Yahoo's existing lineup which also includes content from NBC, Fox and more than 15 cable networks. Yahoo will host and stream CBS's entertainment content free to viewers with ads.

Currently, Yahoo News showcases CBS's 60 MINUTES news program with specially produced segments and content; the CBS Stations Group also provides local news and sports videos to Yahoo from 16 CBS-owned stations. CBS gets to brag about increasing its online video numbers, racking up more than 300+ partnering sites and an "unduplicated" total reach of 92 percent of the U.S.-based web audience.

Online video syndication is the in-thing these days, NBC Universal sees a lot of money in aggregating and syndicating their video for use by third-party websites.

For more:
- Yahoo/CBS partnership announcement

Related articles:
The Olympics, Car Porn, and Online Syndication
Old TV Hot Online

Yahoo adds video to Flickr

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:59:53 -0400

If you haven't already heard enough about Yahoo this week, online photo-sharing community Flickr has launched video sharing. Flickr pro members can now upload personal video clips and share them with friends. Video clips are limited to 90 seconds long and 150MB in size, and users have the ability to make video private, visible to friends and family, or public. There's also the ability to share video clips as a part of a set or embed them on third-party websites, tagging and geotagging capabilities, uploading directly from camera phones and an API for third party developers.

Flickr current gets 42 million monthly worldwide visitors and stores more than two billion photos. However, YouTube remains the king of video having shown 70 million people in the U.S. 2.9 billion video clips in February. In comparison, Fox Interactive Video showed 406 million clips to 21 million people while Yahoo showed 245 million clips to 21 million people.

For more:
- Yahoo Flickr Video press release
- NY Times carrying AP piece here

Related articles:
SPOTLIGHT: YouTube tests HD
Told you so: Yahoo to launch Flickr Video