LeWeb: Chad Hurley, CEO of YouTube

Chad Hurley spoke a few moments ago at LeWeb in Paris and told us that now YouTube streams over one billion videos a day! Although he did not want to disclose the revenues, he shared that Youtube’s top users (only a handful) earn about a million dollar each. Chad Hurley briefly talked about the YouTube Formula 1 project, a blog from where Formula1 events videos are available http://youtubeformula1.blogspot.com/. Chad has another pet project, the clothing brand Alaska, and he plans to open two new stores, one will be located in San Jose, California.

When it came to describe the usage, he confirmed that video creators are a very small percentage of YouTube’s total user base and regarding the mobile video consumption, he said that the volume of uploads is decent, the traffic is growing and his company has to do a better job on the mobile. He does not really see as a social networking site although social networking component are a large part of the user experience, and the existing real time updates and notifications features will be continuously improved.

Ten million people tuned in the live concert’s live stream YouTube organized two months ago, and Chad told us that he plans to have a live streaming service for selected partners in the future. Asked about TV he said that he is seeing tremendous opportunities in the field, the user experience should be improved, made more seamless, and build on an instant on-demand model. To the real time web question he answered that the trend is great, giving people access to even more data, which is good, and the most interesting idea he had was the combination of real time information with location suing geotagging. He confirmed that now YouTube like other social networking sites have more of a “feed mentality” with feeds displayed on the home page.

Liliane Nguyen
Categories: Top Stories
Tags: LeWeb, traveling geeks, YouTube