YouTube and Generation C: The New Mass Market

One billion unique monthly viewers. What television channel in the US, Europe or even China can claim those sorts of numbers? Exactly none.

YouTube has come of age and the audience it brings with it is informed, involved and engaged. YouTube's parent company, Google, refers to them as Generation 'C,' which stands for connection, creation, community and curation. Aside from the fear that this phrasing will now appear repeatedly on endless powerpoint presentations, it captures the salient characteristics that demographers-cum-marketers are trying to identify in order to figure out what drives these videographers, virtuosos and viewers to interact with the assembled content - and hopefully, to purchase the stuff that advertisers might want to sell.

Perhaps even better from a commercial standpoint, most, if not all, of this figurative generation appear to view advertising as an art form. They get that it provides both economic rewards that pay for other activities.  They understand that advertising requires creativity and talent. Not only are they not offended, they are experimenting with the craft, using existing video and memes as the basis for riffs on new themes. Andy Warhol would be impressed.

Of particular interest is the notion that the YouTube viewers may constitute a new mass market, the first since cable began to chip away at the post-war TV audience, further sliced and diced by the rise of the internet. Although the YouTube generation has many more choices and viewing options than did the original CBS or BBC or Canal 1 viewers of 50 years ago, no one else has as yet aggregated as many eyeballs in one place. Determining what causes a YouTube posting to go viral has so far eluded the researchers (and they are trying hard to figure out that secret sauce), the numbers for even those offerings that are mildly successful can be impressive. As for the commercial implications, viewers are not necessarily customers, but they are a great place to start. JL

Lina Saigol reports in the Financial Times:

When YouTube emerged as one of the internet’s most popular sites in 2005, some tech analysts were quick to dismiss it as a fad. Eight years later, however, the home of Korean pop music videos, “Charlie bit my finger – Again!” and budding filmmakers and musicians has reached a milestone that TV networks would kill for: one billion unique monthly viewers.



Driving that stratospheric growth is a new demographic group, dubbed Generation C by researchers at Google (which bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65bn) because they thrive on four ‘C’s: connection, creation, community and curation.
Generation C, Google says, has taken up permanent residence on YouTube, making the site one of their primary daily destinations.
YouTube plays to the way this generation consumes media – in bite-size chunks that become talking points in the same way TV shows do.
One of the biggest contributors to this growth has been South Korean pop sensation Psy, who took the world by storm with his hit ‘Gangnam style’.
Parodies of the kooky music video quickly proliferated as the original version reached one billion views in December 2012, surpassing teen heartthrob Justin Bieber’s 2010 “Baby” video as YouTube’s most-viewed clip.
Generation C is defined not by its age but by so-called “connected behaviour” – constantly switching between devices, thriving on the community around them and finding the content they want to consume. They tend to be in the 18-34 age group and inhabit a multi-screen world of smartphones, tablets and PCs – 67 per cent watch YouTube on two devices or more, Google found.
Advertisers have taken notice of YouTube’s phenomenal rise. Audience size is key to attracting advertisement dollars from companies looking to extend their marketing reach. Nielsen Research Group says Generation C could influence $500bn of spending a year in the US.
In January, a Google executive said in a company earnings call that ‘Gangnam Style’ had generated $8m from YouTube, with 1.2bn views yielding a royalty of about 0.6 cents a viewing.
Howard Davies-Carr’s “Charlie Bit My Finger – Again” – a 56-second home video of a boy and his baby brother in which the latter bites the former’s finger – is another of YouTube’s most watched videos. As of October 2012, Mr Davies-Carr had made about $500,000 from the clip.
What YouTube has not yet figured out, however, is what makes a “viral success.”
Jonah Berger, a professor at Wharton, studied the success of “Charlie Bit My Finger – Again!” and concluded its popularity was down to the “visceral emotions it arouses in viewers.”
The study suggested that “the popularity of such videos is rooted in the way they excite the body, inducing a spectrum of physiological changes”. That causes people to become more likely to share information, which in turn can be associated with the video’s success.