Music Videos Generate Biggest ROI For YouTube

Music videos generate the highest return-on-investment for YouTube despite making up a relatively small percentage of all videos uploaded, according to a new analysis by the global video and music search engine and analytics platform Pex. The study concludes that music is “crucial” to the video-sharing platform’s profits, despite representing only about 5% of all videos uploaded.

The analysis breaks up YouTube's video content into a number of popular categories, including "gaming" (by far the fastest-growing category), "people and blogs," "entertainment" and "film and animation." Of those categories, roughly 35% of videos uploaded to the platform fall into “people and blogs" and just over 30% fall into “gaming."

While music (or music-related) videos make up a much smaller percentage, Pex found that they racked up a collective 1.987 trillion views on YouTube in 2018 (an average of 16,937 views per video), representing 20% of all views on the platform. That compares with just 693 million views for gaming videos, representing an average view count of 2,987 and only 7% of all views.

The relative profitability of gaming videos is further affected by their average length of 24.7 minutes, compared with just 6.8 minutes for music videos. “Gaming content is by far the longest, which requires YouTube to spend more money on hosting it,” wrote Pex founder and CEO Rasty Turek in a Medium post announcing the study. “Music, on the other hand, is the shortest of all categories, but in turn generates the most views per average video.”