14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube is by far the largest video site in the world, dwarfing its competitors with audiences ten times bigger. Still, despite its popularity, revenue hasn't been what many had hoped by now and it is trying a number of things to get ad money pouring in.
One thing that it's betting hard on is professional content as these videos get top dollars from the advertisers compared to most of the user-generated one. But while it usually boasts all kinds of shows or even full length movies, YouTube occasionally tries its hand at live streaming and its latest attempt, a live U2 concert, proved the most popular yet.
How popular? Well, the site managed to rake in 10 million streams for the two-and-a-half hour long concert. The numbers make it a huge success for YouTube and also prove the site could handle the load and the additional strain of a live streaming event. In fact, most users reported very few issues and the quality of the video and sound was above that of most similar streams.
YouTube received a helping hand in getting the content to the millions of users watching all over the world as at least some of the load was handled by the Akamai content delivery network. These CDNs are becoming increasingly popular for handling high amounts of traffic even for someone like Google with its high computing power and bandwidth.
It isn't clear at the moment how many people were watching at any point but the first live streaming event from YouTube managed to get 700,000 concurrent viewers, so it's safe to assume that the U2 concert got considerably more. Still, while huge by web standards, the 10 million viewers wouldn't even get in the top 20 highest rated shows on TV in the US in a regular week. What's more, YouTube's audience was from around the world. But the simple fact that online video can now compete at this level speaks volumes for how far it has grown since only a few years ago.