Article Roundup and CBS-YouTube Data

A number of interesting articles across the net, CBS|YouTube numbers for the past week, and some upcoming surprises.

First off, the articles:

The Fuzzy Math of Big Media’s Digital Revenue – at AdAge.

It seems like every major player expects to make US$500 Million from digital ad revenues, even though everyone defines digital differently. Good read to get an idea of who’s playing where.

Is Mining Virtual Gold Exploitative? – at MTV Overdrive

This is one of those mind-blowing news segments straight out of some Sci-Fi book. Imagine hordes of Chinese adolescents working twelve-hour shifts mining gold… virtual gold, that is. The gold in question exists only inside the virtual worlds of World of Warcraft (WoW) and is sold through international brokers to wealthier players who lack the time (or skill) to obtain it on their own. On a similar vein (pun fully intended) a recent press release announced Anshe Chung had become Second Life’s first virtual millionaire. Don’t you just love this?

Will Paying for User Video Pay Off? – at GigaOM

A nice round-up of Internet video companies that pay their users for uploaded content.

YouTube vs TV – at Mashable
Apparently, internet video websites are stealing users away from regular television (according to a BBC report – not that I trust the BBC a whole lot, anyway). But this seems reasonable – after all, time spent watching internet video is time spent away from the TV.

Why the Verizon/YouTube deal doesn’t matter – at CinemaTech
A simple explanation of why this YouTube/Verizon deal is not important… mainly, it’s too restrictive (which is exactly the opposite of why YouTube was such a success in the first place).

And now the good stuff:

All the coding/learning time paid off and I now have one week’s worth of CBS|YouTube data which I’ll be reporting on this week.

Total Views for CBS videos on YouTube between midnight November 21 and midnight November 28 were: 6,849,294.

Most Total Daily Views were on Wednesday, November 22nd (1,333,848) and Least Total Daily Views were today, Tuesday, November 28th (410,094).

Most Daily Views for any particular show were on Wednesday, November 23rd: 309,188 viewers watched Michael Richards (“Kramer”) Apologize.

Please note that since I do not have direct control over YouTube’s servers, these numbers may be off by a couple of late-night viewers. Nothing serious, in any case.

Stay tuned for graphics and additional data.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Content Delivery Networks, Data Analysis, Digital Media Strategy, Ratings, Second Life, Television, Web Video, YouTube