14 DAY TRIAL // Online music is growing at a healthy pace with YouTube clearly dominating, but other players like Hulu, at least in the US, are coming strong from behind. One trend that has helped this growth lately is the increasing amount of professional content available online. And, while TV series and shows are proving quite popular on Hulu, it's still music videos that have the biggest sway as the latest numbers from comScore prove. Just one month after launch, Vevo, the music video joint venture between three of the major labels and YouTube, is already the number one music site in the US, thanks in no small part to the latter of the partners.
"We are thrilled that the VEVO Network, which is still in its infancy, has debuted at the top of the comScore rankings for unique visitors across the Entertainment-Music category in the U.S.," Rio Caraeff, Vevo CEO and president, said. "The interest and enthusiasm our users have shown has been both gratifying and inspiring. We are also proud to deliver such strong traffic results straight out of the gate to our content and marketing partners, which solidify their early belief in the VEVO vision," he added.
The numbers tell the whole story, Vevo got 35.4 million unique visitors in the US, where it is available, in December. And this just for three weeks of the month as the site only launched on December 8. The runner-up, MySpace Music which also recently added a music video section, got just 33.1 million visitors last month. Note that this is for the entire service, not just the video section. AOL Music with 29.0 million visitors, Warner Music with 23.3 million, MTV Networks Music with 17.6 million and Yahoo Music with 16.4 million follow.
The reason for its staggering success is rather obvious as the majority of the traffic Vevo got (92 percent or 32.6 million visitors) came straight from YouTube, which now has a dedicated Vevo channel that encompasses all the music videos from the three labels backing the site, Universal, Sony and EMI. In fact, the Vevo channel, also counting individual artists' channels, is now the most popular on YouTube with very close to 13 billion streams until now.