YouTube Users Pass on Paying for Movies [NewTeeVee]
Who said selling television programming is easy?
A few days ago, I posted on YouTube’s plans to bring several independent movies from the Sundance Film Festival to online viewers for a $4 rental fee. NewTeeVee reports that viewers haven’t shown much interest in paying to watch the five films now available.
As of Monday, all five films had been rented a total of less than 1,500 times. Keeping in mind that YouTube has a monthly U.S. audience in excess of 100 million viewers, that’s a very small conversion rate for YouTube’s first experiment with paid content. Running the numbers, NewTeeVee estimates that YouTube has generated less than $6,000 with movie rentals.
Considering the amount of promotion YouTube put into this test, including a featured banner at the top of the site’s home page, it would be hard to characterize it as anything but back to the drawing board time for YouTube’s paid content efforts.
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