Vevo, a new music video site named last week as Fast Company’s #4 most innovative music company of 2010, is getting its traffic the old-fashioned way: through YouTube.
Data shared by video tracking and analytics firm TubeMogul indicate Vevo’s videos have received an incredible number of views since the site launched. The company tracks only views at YouTube, not the number of streams at Vevo.com. Nevertheless, the numbers (as of February 22) are evidence of the volume of videos being served by Vevo’s ad-supported platform.
* 240 million views in the past 14 days
* 14 million average daily views
* 1.02 billion views since launching on December 8, 2009
The pure numbers show a great start, but the actual strength of Vevo is more questionable. The vast majority of Vevo’s views are the result of syndication at YouTube. January report by ComScore said roughly 92% of Vevo’s 35.4 million visitors in December came from YouTube. At that rate, Vevo has streamed 1.1 billion total views and about 88 million of those streams would have come from Vevo.com – a small number for a standalone site with big aspirations. The remainder, the 1.02 billion views TubeMogul tracked, came from YouTube. (As CNET reported a few weeks ago, there is some controversy over ComScore’s methodology for tracking unique visitors in January. The ComScore figures given here, however, are for December traffic.)
As of February 22, Vevo has just over 16,000 videos. The videos of Universal Music Group and Sony Music, partners in the joint venture, are currently on Vevo.com. EMI signed on to Vevo on the eve of its launch. Its videos are so far noticeably absent.
Vevo’s numbers eclipse any other publisher over this period of time, according to TubeMogul. As a point of comparison, CBS, one of YouTube’s top publishers, averaged about 900,000 views per day in the past two weeks and had a total of nearly 95 million views since Vevo’s launch.
Since Vevo’s launch, Warner Music Group has averaged 9.3 million views per day at YouTube and has had a total of 512 million streams. Warner is the lone major label group that has not licensed its content to Vevo.
