Millions of subscribers for top UK YouTube networks

Matt Brittin

“Well over” 100 YouTube content partners in the UK now have an audience of more than a million subscribers, with overall viewing time on the site growing 50% year-on-year, according to Google Europe president, Matt Brittin. 

Speaking at the Guardian Changing Media Summit yesterday, Brittin described the evolution of YouTube from “a pile of lawsuits and a storage problem,” to a site that, ten years on, is “drawing in solid amounts of money,” with those revenues “growing well.”

In a keynote titled ‘YouTube at 10’, Brittin said “watch time is going up 50% year-on-year, but also the amount of money we’re paying out to partners is going up 50% year-on-year and has done in each of the last three years.”

Detailing a string of stats, Brittin said that on a typical day 98% of 18 to 34 year-olds will watch a video on their smartphone, marking a “big shift” in the way that viewers consuming content.

He said that YouTube has “many more than a billion viewers per-month”, that 300 hours of video is uploaded every minute and that half of the site’s views are now on mobile devices.

“In the UK, [YouTube has] 40 million viewers per-month, watching on average eight hours of video a month, and that’s on average 191 videos. Many short, some long, and as I say the watch-time has been growing quite significantly,” said Brittin.

He also revealed that four of the top 10 trending videos in the UK last year were from brands and that on average 60% of the views of a video come from outside the country that it was made in.

“In the case of X Factor and Got Talent formats, nearly 80% of the views come from outside the country they were created in,” said Brittin.

The Google exec claimed he didn’t know what was coming next for YouTube, but predicted that the internet population will close to double by 2020, with most of these new web-users accessing the net on camera-equipped phones.

Brittin was recently interviewed by DTVE at Cable Congress – click here to view the video.