YouTube Expected to Earn $5.6 Billion in Revenue for 2013

Google-owned YouTube reached an impressive milestone when it passed the one billion user mark earlier this year. Now the popular online video service is poised to achieve another milestone by crossing the five billion dollar mark. According to recent estimates by eMarketer, YouTube is expected to generate $5.6 billion in gross revenue for 2013, up 51 percent from last year. That figure would represent 11 percent of Google’s total advertising revenues.

“That figure does not include money YouTube passes on to advertising partners and content creators,” reports Advertising Age. “This year Google will keep 35 percent of that total or $1.96 billion, according to eMarketer’s estimate. Google generally takes a 45 percent cut of advertising sold into its content partners, and Google’s take is exected to rise in the coming years as it phases out less-favorable revenue-sharing deals with TV networks.”

“After revenue sharing, YouTube will take $850 million this year from video ads served in the U.S., which is up 50 percent from last year,” explains the article. “Including display ads, YouTube will will net $1.08 billion this year in U.S. ad revenues. For context, that’s still just 6.3 percent of all of Google’s net U.S. ad revenues for the year, but 20.5 percent of the $4.15 billion U.S. online video ad market.”

While YouTube has invested in expanding the amount of premium content to attract advertising dollars, the service still relies on its audience numbers for revenue growth.

“Growth in impressions and viewership, particularly across devices, is probably the major growth driver [behind YouTube’s ad revenues],” said Clark Fredricksen, eMarketer VP communications.

“EMarketer isn’t breaking out YouTube’s mobile ad revenue, but Google’s chief business officer Nikesh Arora said in July that the service’s mobile-ad sales had grown by 300 percent between January and June of this year,” notes AdAge. “More than one billion people tune in to YouTube each month, and roughly 40 percent of views occur on phones and tablets.”

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