14 DAY TRIAL // A couple of weeks ago, YouTube announced that it would be testing movie rentals on the site. It would start with five Sundance Festival films which were available for streaming for 10 days. YouTube wanted to see if people were willing to pay to watch movies on the site and also how smooth would everything go. Depending on how you look at it, the experiment was a moderate success or a complete failure. YouTube got answers to its questions, but it also only got $10,709.16 in rental revenue.
The five movies were viewed a total of 2,684 times, not exactly ground-breaking numbers, and at $3.99 a pop, it all added to the sum above. So, at first glance, it doesn't look like movie rentals are going to be the thing to bring YouTube into profitability. The fact that the experiment wasn't going to be a financial success was apparent from the first days and it's now clear that things went even worse after that.
Still, Google is satisfied with the results. “It definitely exceeded our expectations given all the barriers,” Chris Dale, a YouTube spokesman told the New York Times. Google says that movie streaming is still a new concept online, and certainly on YouTube and most people aren't familiar with it and don't expect to pay to watch something on the site. YouTube also didn't exactly go out of its way promoting the feature or deploying a comprehensive solution to movie rentals. For example, there was no movie rental hub, to list all of the films available.
The second problem came from the movies themselves. While a few hundred views are insignificant on YouTube, it's an audience comparable to the number of people who saw the films in other places. In fact, Google says that some of them basically doubled their audience after the YouTube test. The site is moving ahead with plans to add other movies to the rental program, but the Holy Grail, of course, remains big studio movies which are rumored to be coming to YouTube not so far in the future.