Youtube Edges Closer to TV Numbers and TV Money with Wedding Dance

by Jason
July 30, 2009

Google put up a blog post today about how they monetized the viral video hit Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding party dance(below). This video was posted on July 16th and has generated over 12 million hits in 2 weeks.

TV Numbers

For some perspective, the highest rated American prime time TV show during that time was America’s Got Talent with 13.2 million viewers. TV has long been light years ahead of any online numbers.  This example shows that the gap is closing. Truly remarkable content is beginning to reach large viewership numbers online in shorter and shorter time spans. And it is not always professionally produced.

And the gap is only going to narrow. The online audience will continue to grow larger. The information is moving faster and faster. And more and more people are becoming savvy content creators.

Who is Making the Money?

Google is, the content middle man, the distributor. The distributors hold a lot of the power moving forward. Think iTunes on the music front and Amazon on the book front. The “rights holders” to the song in the video, Forever by Chris Brown, were also able to easily monetize (I assume his label or manager). The song has shot up to the top 5 on both Amazon and iTunes.

A Workable System

This did not happen overnight. Youtube has been a battleground for some time now, with entertainment industry giants facing off against Google on profit sharing. Google has been working voraciously behind the scenes to make this process easy for the rights holders. Instead of deleting every piece of copyrighted material, the entertainment industry can overlay an amazon download link for the song and Google Adwords in the sidebar. Everyone is happy.

Of course it would also be nice if after a certain viewer threshhold the video creator got a peice of the action as well. No word on that from the Google blog as of yet.

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  • johnfhunt
    I wonder first if this video is authentic or not? Secondly, in order to go viral like this and get this many views in such a short period it would need some help from YouTube. How did the word get out so fast? Finally, seeing that Google has boasted about this experiment on their blog I wonder if the whole thing isn't rigged to make Google and YouTube look good? Perhaps a conspiracy?? The bottom line, though, is that 16 million (at the time of this writing), is a huge audience for a non-network TV program. Internet video is here to stay!
  • @John I do not think it is fake. I have seen some pretty crazy dance
    routines at weddings. And they were not that great, good choreography, but
    not all of them were talented dancers to say the least. I got the feeling
    the bride had to be talked into it. And yes, I am sure Youtube helped it
    along.

    A long way yet to go, but this is a good sign for the future Youtube.
  • Samantha J.
    Wow, that is awful quick for 12 million views. I can't believe the couple gets none of that. I suppose they did rip off the rights to the song, but still, I think you are right. If the rights holder has already agreed, they should get something after a certain amount of views. Only fair.
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