YouTube, the popular video networking site, was unavailable on March 25th due to technical difficulties. The site, which attracts millions of users from across the globe, was down for one hour while technicians attempted to rectify the problem. Clay Aiken fans everywhere awoke to the outage, and panicked.

Billboard.biz calculated what they thought the impact would be on the major music labels from the outage on Youtube.  They used a company called TubeMogul.  Their InPlay component analyzes and tracks the viewership.
According to TubeMogul analysis, Vevo videos get about 14 million views per day through YouTube. Warner Music Group videos received 9.3 million views per day. If you add in the other companies, the total is about 29.3 million views per day for the four major music companies on a global basis.

If you assume that all the videos are paid, and using a rough estimate of 0.65 cents per stream, those 29.3 million views generate about $190,000 per day. Traffic may vary by hour of the day and day of the week, but on average the four majors pull in a combined $8,000 per hour from their YouTube plays.

So, if these calculations are correct, the music companies and their artists lost a lot of money.

“YouTube is up again following a technical issue which has now been resolved,” said a YouTube spokesperson. “We know how important YouTube is for people and apologize for any inconvenience the downtime may have caused.”

I had no idea that YouTube generated so much money for the music companies.  With all the YouTubes we make and watch using Clay Aiken and his music, we are helping the music companies.  I can only hope it helps Clay too.

Speaking if YouTubes, the following is one of my favorites.