YouTube’s top five corporate channels – which include music video distributor Vevo, video game network Machinima, and a new media company named Maker Studios – gathered a total of 1.5 billion views in May. This is good news for YouTube, which has struggled to find audiences and ad dollars for its premium channels.
Despite falling views in its seventh year, which YouTube maintains is intentional, the month of May saw growth for YouTube’s corporate channels. Rounding out the top partner channel list are Warner Music Group and Fullscreen. The statistics and analytics firm Nielsen, which released May viewing data in a blog post yesterday, broke the numbers down further:
- More than half of all traffic to the top five partner channels were viewers under the age of 35.
- Vevo, whose channels distribute music videos by top-selling musicians like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, collected the most views with a total of 695 million. Vevo also saw the highest percentage of viewers over the age of 50, with 15.7%. Fullscreen came in second with 15.3%.
- Machinima, who we called “the No. 1 entertainment network” in March, collected the most streams per viewer, at 24. Machinima, which is the second overall most-viewed channel and the fourth most-subscribed-to channel, also saw a 62.6% male audience. (Every other top-performing channel saw a 50/50 split in gender.)
- Maker Studios, which bills itself as “the United Artists of the Millennium” and represents top YouTubers such as the site’s first millionaire Ray William Johnson, collected 9.7 million unique viewers with an average of 10 streams per viewer.
- One in six Americans that watched a video online in May streamed a video from Warner Music Group, to the tune of 23 million uniques. Warner Music Group also includes the premium content channel The Warner Sound, which has seen phenomenal growth, at 27 million views since launching in March.
Photo by jonsson.
