CBS Sees Increased Viewing Stats After YouTube Deal

• November 23rd, 2006 | Streaming Video

CBS’s daily feed of sports, news and entertainment clips, distributed on the CBS Channel on YouTube, has become one of the most popular destinations on the site.  Since CBS and YouTube (recently purchased by Google for the ridiculous amount of $1.65 billion) signed the deal a month ago, some 300 clips have been uploaded and received 29.2 million views or about 857,000 views per day.  That’s not bad going, especially since they’ve only been up for a little over a month.

The most popular clips seem to be CSI:NY, Letterman, The Early Show and NCIS in no particular order.  The channel has 24,000 subscribers and growing, which is absolute gold dust for the CBS market research team.  They must be laughing all the way to the bank.

Interestingly, CBS says there has been a noticeable uptick in ratings for their TV shows since the deal went live on YouTube.  The Late Show with David Letterman is up 200,000 viewers while the Late Show with Craig Fergusons is up 100,000 viewers.  On these figures alone, it won’t be long before ther network muscle in on the YouTube crowd.  The question is, will they want them all there?