If you follow music closely, you've already heard all about the YouTube Music Awards ceremony, whether it was Lady Gaga debuting the song "Dope" or Arcade Fire's Win Butler reenacting Kanye West to a bunch of Taylor Swift fans. But odds are you found out about it after the fact, thanks to a plurality of media coverage (ourselves included). When the final viewership was considered, it doesn't seem like the show did that well.
At it's peak, the YouTube awards were being viewed by 220,000 people at one point. Tracking overall views are difficult, as the show was broadcast online, versus the traditional television. The comparison point being offered by Forbes and other sources is that the VMA's got 10.1 million total viewers. It's certainly unfair to compare momentary viewership to total viewership, but YouTube wouldn't have come close.
It may seem unfair to compare YTMA to the VMAs at all, but the website is the top platform for introducing users to new music. Not Facebook, not Soundcloud...YouTube. For it to draw the small crowd that it did is of course disappointing, but it also may affect the websites ability to draw viewers to its theoretical second run during 2014. Lady Gaga was there last weekend for the show's debut, but will she be willing to return to a show that can only get her 220,000 viewers (it was during her performance that viewership peaked).
Social media seemed to be doing well, but the internet broadcast may have hurt that cause in the long run as well. More than 300,000 tweets were made about the event in the three hours leading up to it, however it dropped off sharply once the show began. Forbes' Bobby Owsinski is probably correct when he presumed that viewers watching the show on their phones or pads didn't want to switch over to Twitter mid-broadcast.
Just a few things to consider moving forward, YouTube.
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