YouTube and the coming beatdown of TV ad revenues

YouTube is becoming one of those “gradually, then all at once” phenomena – like the rise of always-on high-speed internet a decade ago, or the gradual-then-sudden collapse of newspaper ad revenues from ’05-’08.

When a colleague and I first negotiated a YouTube syndication/revenue share agreement back in 2007, most of the media world treated YouTube as a novelty, a place for keyboard cats and 14-year-olds’ rants. Certainly it would never be a venue for serious content, or for real ad dollars.

Today? Media companies are falling over themselves to expand their YT presence. Talent is flocking to its burgeoning content channels. A knowing acquaintance talks of regularly cashing $10,000-a-month revenue-share checks from YouTube for his guerrilla content operation – and of people he knows who often add a zero to that figure. (Why no link? I’m respecting a confidence, folks.)

Oh, and before my friends on the broadcast side of the media business feel too smug about their record-breaking political season?

Local TV makes strong revenues (and high rates) because of its oligopoly power over geographically targeted video ads – and because there are inherent limits on its ad inventory (only 24 hours a day, only certain hours during the day with high viewership around local content, only x minutes of ads per hour). To media companies, those both feel like protection against the sort of collapse that roiled the newspaper business.

Except:

We all know the Obama campaign in particular spent boatloads on YouTube this cycle.

And I just saw my first-ever LOCAL business running a pre-roll on YouTube. Something is afoot when local businesses in the sleepy backwater of Nielsen DMA 43 start changing their ad-buying patterns.

I’m not predicting an imminent collapse in broadcast revenues. (Ad dollars do follow the audience – but usually much more slowly than new ventures would like.) But YouTube has nearly unlimited ad inventory, and breathtaking targeting abilities. Change is coming.