Was YouTube Live a Success? That Depends.

Excerpt: After much talk about experimenting with live streaming video, YouTube dipped its toe in the water on the weekend, with a much-hyped event (at least in blogosphere terms) called YouTube Live, featuring some of the "cewebrities" that have emerged on YouTube over the past year or two — including Tay "Chocolate Rain" Zonday, LisaNova and Chad Vader, as well as a few big-name entertainment-industry stars like Katy Perry and Will.i.am. The show had the feel of an awards show, although it was one featuring stars most people probably wouldn't recognize. So was it a success for YouTube? That depends a lot on your perspective.

According to numbers that Mogulus came up with, YouTube Live saw about 700,000 simultaneous viewers at the peak of the event on Saturday night. As Peter Kafka notes in a column at All Things Digital, those aren't really the kinds of numbers that would make for a successful show in TV Land. In fact, if a studio saw those kinds of viewership numbers, they would likely pull the plug on a show. In the TV business, if you're not pulling in several million viewers a night, you're toast. Using that as a benchmark, YouTube Live wasn't exactly a blockbuster.