YouTube Video Streams Top 1 Billion/Day

We’ve been hearing for some day (starting with an ex-Youtube employee) that the number of video streams per day reported by Comscore, Nielsen and other metrics services way under-report on Youtube’s total video streams.

It’s hard to compare apples to apples, though. Recent Comscore documents says Google/YouTube streams just under 7 billion videos per month in the U.S., up from around 5 billion/month late last year. That’s about 225 million streams a day, which still puts them well above all the next major competitors (MySpace, Hulu, Yahoo, Viacom, Microsoft, etc.). Nielsen says Google/YouTube streams 5.5 billion videos/month in the U.S.

But the real number of streams/day, we’ve now confirmed from Google, is above 1 billion/day worldwide. That matches what we’ve heard from other sources. That pretty much means everyone on the Internet, on average, is watching one YouTube video per day.

Google hasn’t commented on that in the past, and we can’t figure out precisely why. It may have to do with ongoing litigation and the desire to keep exact numbers quiet. Or it may be that they don’t necessarily want analysts to have deep insight into YouTube’s true cost structure.

We’ve

spoken to Comscore about that casually in the past, and they’ve noted that their estimates are based on available input, and that goods doesn’t involve direct access to YouTube servers. Some companies choose to give Comscore deep access, others don’t. The details quality suffers accordingly.

But one thing is clear. Comscore thinks the total online video space is around 17 billion monthly streams in the U.S. We now know that YouTube alone serves that many video streams every fifteen days or so worldwide. duration to revise those numbers up - whether YouTube has 40% of the online market share for video like Comscore says (it may actually be much higher market share, another reason Google may not want that documents out there), that means the total number of video streams on the Net is approaching 80 billion/month, a heady number.

We’ve approached MySpace and Hulu, the no. 2 and no. 3 online video services, for their exact streaming numbers. So far, no response.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

cellphone accessories iphone mobile games cellphone mobile downloads wireless phone mobile apps blackberry free cellphone cellphone wallpaper unlock iphone smartphone cellphone camera iphone apps cellular phone unlock cellphone apple iphone iphone application ringtones cellphone reviews