Written by Chris Albrecht
Posted Monday, June 29, 2009 at 3:49 PM PT

When It Comes to TV Content, Is YouTube Screwed?

Over the past year, YouTube has made a concerted effort to embrace premium content like TV shows to attract ad revenue. But according to a new report from Screen Digest analyst Arash Amel, the video-sharing giant faces an uphill battle as the Hollywood networks and studios gobble up most of the market for ad-supported TV programming online.

In his report “US Networks claim half of free online TV market,” Amel says that the broadcasting and cable business in the U.S. will shed $2 billion in ad revenue by 2013, dropping to $67 billion from $69 billion in 2008. While TV ad dollars go down, there will be an increase in ad revenue generated by TV programming on the web. Amel says that ad-supported, web-based TV programming generated $448 million in revenues in 2008, and the total ad revenues from online entertainment programming, sports, news and events will be more than $1.45 billion by 2013.

StatShot: Super-Sized Tweets

We’ve got a ton of TV-related Twitter action this week, and surprise, surprise, Trendrr says the Super Bowl (or “superbowl” for the character-limit conscious) reigned supreme, with everyone tweeting about the exciting game.

Unfortunately, all those bummed Arizona fans threw off Trendrr’s charts a little as their Tweets about how the Cardinals “lost” made it look like people were buzzing about the show Lost at the end of last week. Such are the dangers of tracking commonly named shows.

Fox Wrings More Time Out of Fewer Viewers

Nielsen released September viewers stats for web sites of the four major broadcast networks last week, revealing that the number of unique viewers went up across the board. But, in an odd turn of statistics, only Fox, which had the fewest unique visitors, was able to increase the amount of time per viewer on its site. In fact, time spent on Fox nearly doubled, while other sites fell off a cliff.

According to Nielsen, the new fall season and the tail end of the presidential campaign helped drive up the number of people logging on to the networks as they caught up on missed TV. NBC in particular got a more than 300 percent bump, which can be explained in part by one woman: Tina Fey-lin. The SNL star’s Palin impersonation was viral video gold.

But, while almost all the networks saw triple percentage growth in uniques from August to September (poor, CBS with its measly double-digits), only Fox saw an increase in time spent. CBS and NBC actually saw the time viewers spent on their sites just about cut in half. That’s bad news, because less time spent means fewer ads seen.