That's a lotta cats: 40% of YouTube vids are streamed to mobes

40 per cent of YouTube streams are being delivered to mobile devices, to Google's delight – though this could seen as a failure to get beyond blink-and-you'll-miss-it cat videos into something more profitable. The numbers came out during a Google earnings call late last week, which showed the Chocolate Factory beating …

[Ralph B]

What's Mobile?

Is a laptop mobile? Is an iPad, Slate or Android tablet mobile? What if it has a (bluetooth) keyboad? Is it still mobile then? Is using an iPhone YouTube client but throwing it onto the TV via an Apple TV box mobile? Ditto Android Phone to Chromecast dongle? Is that mobile?

The point here is that mobile and non-mobile are rather blurred and irrelevant terms.

What Google are celebrating is not that they have 40% of traffic from mobile, but rather that they have sucecssfully maintained the YouTube monopoly of video content supply, despite the move to mobile platforms.

[S4qFBxkFFg]

Re: What's Mobile?

Also, you'll have a lot of people changing user agent strings to avoid being served the crappy mobile version of certain sites when viewing it in the browser, further screwing up the numbers.

The stupidity of "this content is not available on mobile devices" makes it even more likely. (Which is a shame, because some mobile sites actually work OK.)

[Evil Auditor]

... so iPads around the world are potentially sitting in man caves playing music while appearing as mobile consumers of video.

Not only that but also companies' intranets blocking youtube et al did in fact not equally block the demand to use such services and watch cat videos. So users do what appears sensible in such a situation: resort to a platform that isn't blocked, ie mobile device.

[Trevor 3]

Hopefully with this new report they won't ban so many sodding videos on the mobile platform?

wake up, record companies, wake up!

You are missing a revenue stream!

[Rukario]

But... Purina (and now Del Monte) already own the rights to the Meow Mix commercial!

[Captain Scarlet]

On every mobile anyway

My experience is its on every mobile anyway so I can see this would be possible, even Blackberry have an app (Ok its a shortcut to the mobile website)

[MikeyD85]

Always use mobile here.

Well, I say mobile. There's not much mobile about a wifi only Nexus 7, but it's done the job of YouTube player for the last year or so quite happily!

[ecofeco]

The adverts are there

Many, though not even most, videos now have adverts at the beginning.

Only a matter of time before they all do. Like cable.

Anyone remember when cable had no adverts because, well, you were already paying for it? How'd that work out?