Imagine walking into a product manager’s office and telling them to forget putting the band’s videos on YouTube because it’s worthless.  What do you think the reaction would be?

You’d probably get called a Luddite, etc., etc., etc.  You don’t understand millennials.  Streaming is the future.  YouTube is a key part of our marketing plan, and so on.

Or said another way, all the latest excuses for why a record “isn’t reacting”.  It couldn’t possibly be that people are spending time on a worthless marketing channel, right?

Fortunately, you have some additional evidence now.  Yes, the dynamic and oh so very soulful Christophe Mueller, the latest in a long line of YouTube executives from Central Casting, tells us that music videos have next to nothing to do with this:

No, Mr. Christophe gives out numbers that work out to 2.5% of YouTube’s overall usage.  So little it’s pretty meaningless.  Which of course explains why Google wanted shares in Vevo, because it’s all meaningless and of no value.

If professional music videos have so little to do with YouTube’s growth, then what is driving the growth? Let me guess–it’s the “fair use” that caused this growth rate, right?

All this convoluted ContentID/claiming monetzation, that’s just chump change compared to the real play…which is what, exactly?  YouTube stars making millions from beauty products that are glorified product placements?  Cat videos.  Fart lighting.  Underage girls twerking.  Jihadi recruitment videos.  Hookers and sugar babies.  How to videos on shooting heroin into the femoral artery.  Bigots who rock.  Right.  That’s the answer.  We’re just a little slow and self-centered to think we had something to do with YouTube’s success.  And of course Mr. Christophe has the real story because YouTube is continually audited and never lies.

Silly us.  We thought that there was some value to everyone in the music industry using their marketing budget to drive traffic to YouTube.  Nah….it was always the cats.

Great news.  Now we can save all the time and overhead devoted to managing YouTube’s inability to get it right.  All of which we did because everyone thought it was worth something.

Who knew it was worthless!

Set everything to block and let’s be on our way to something more valuable.