[This is an important post from Jonathan Lee (@telecomsense) that fills in some of the available data on just how much of YouTube is music and infers what that means for royalties.]

YouTube Is Primarily a Music Service

Given recent headlines criticizing YouTube’s algorithms for promoting home movies of pre-teens to pedophiles, violent videos to young children, as well as political extremism/bullying, you might have the idea that a lot of people watch these videos; they don’t. As this fascinating post–describing documents that surfaced in Viacom’s copyright suit against Google–explains, YouTube became popular not because of homemade videos, but because it embraced piracy.

The model of other people’s copyrighted videos driving user traffic remains the secret of YouTube’s success. Social media monitoring firm Pex recently calculated that less than 1% of YouTube’s videos–0.64%–were responsible for over 80% of video views. The majority of these videos are music videos.

Read the post on TelecomSense