YouTube launched in February 2005. By the summer of 2006 it was delivering 2 to 2.5 billion views a month. That made it a very big deal. In October Google purchased it for $1.65 billion. With the Google imprimatur and that volume of delivery the media world began to take it seriously. The silly video clips continue, but serious media wanted to get in on the act, though it took a while.
Al Jazeera English was the first of the three to mount news reports on YouTube. Their first stories went up in November of 2006. BBC World and France 24 followed suit in the spring of 2007. The monthly counts are presented in the chart.
Al Jazeera had only a handful of reports on YouTube for the first six months. The counts are not very accurate because a quarter of the reports were undated, and they were not putting them up in chronological order. Nevertheless they had only a few stories a month until April of 2007 when they posted 138 stories. In May it was 271 — with similar numbers in June and July — and in August it reached 300+ stories where it has remained every month since.
France 24 had no stories on YouTube until May of 2007 when they posted 31 stories. In September they jumped to 100+ stories where they have been almost every month since.
BBC World got off to the slowest start. They posted 16 reports in May and were then off and on until November of 2007 when they jumped up to 67 stories. Between November of 2007 and April of 2008 they posted 20 to 40 stories a month. Then the big jump. In May they posted 202 stories. Obviously someone decided that they had to get with it.
Interpretation
YouTube is a new communication infrastructure — three years should qualify as new. Once it was obvious that it was serious serious media felt the need to explore how they could reach out to audiences through this new channel. Each of the three channels runs news programs 24 hours a day, but this is a new opportunity to reach audience. Al Jazeera has clearly decided to invest more in YouTube than the other two. It started earlier, and they are putting 10 stories a day there. France 24 took a bit longer to get going and they are only mounting 3 stories per day. BBC World has taken the longest to decide to take YouTube seriously — only in May 2008 have they put a substantial number of stories per day there. May could be an aberration or it may be the start of something big.
Putting reports on YouTube is reaching out to a global audience. Not only is it a large and active audience it is also global. Half of the views of videos on YouTube are delivered to audiences outside the United States.
The numbers only tell us that they are reaching for a global audience. They do not tell us what the news becomes in order to reach this audience. That is what the research needs to turn to next.
