Over the past six months, YouTube has seen a shift in the number of viewers watching long-form content, such half-hour network TV shows, to a category of video that didn’t really exist before YouTube. It’s called “midtail” content.
Midtail is in a category somewhere between studio-produced and user-generated video and it is becoming more and more popular. According to Advertising Age and video analytics firm TubeMogul, “the top 100 midtail producers, including names such as College Humor, have racked up more than 2 billion views during the past six months on YouTube, growing nearly 5% a month on average. Meanwhile, the full-length hour-long and half-hour TV shows on YouTube, 3,215 episodes in all, have accumulated 19.5 million views.”
Since most of the valuable rights to major TV shows are under contract with Hulu for the next two years, YouTube has turned to midtail content because, according to Advertising Age, “it supplies the biggest pool of brand-safe ad impressions, fertile ground for YouTube’s overlays and banners, and malleable content for brand integrations it can peddle to Madison Avenue.”
“The closest thing as made-for-YouTube is this midtail; it’s more snack-size — you’re watching at work when you have less time,” said TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson. “As audiences grow, this will be more profitable for YouTube than selling ESPN’s content.”