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Digital
Mega YouTube views are not lucrative, say OK Go
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 22 February 2012
OK Go might be YouTube poster boys with their hugely popular videos, but millions of views on the video platform does not a business make, or so says their manager Jamie Kitman, who was speaking at the recent SF MusicTech conference, according to Digital Music News.
The royalties received from YouTube are nominal, despite the popularity of the videos, Kitman said, and all that video viewing does not result in mega record sales either (which is partly because the songs aren’t all that great, but there you go). OK Go!’s main income stream is sponsorship, Kitman confirmed, with big brands keen to work with a band whose pop promos generate such large traffic and media chatter. But that option, the manager conceded, is only open to artists with an existing fanbase and reputation.
DMN quotes Kitman thus: “I can speak for an artist who gets a lot of traffic, which is OK Go. And I would say that ‘trickle’ is the operative word, in terms of the revenue we receive from places like YouTube and VEVO. The YouTube revenue is so small based on how many streams we’ve done that I would say that it’s not a business model, it’s like finding change on the street”.