Fact is...No one watches Ads on YouTube....

I love the end of year Best of Series that comes out for advertising. 

Ad Week has the Top 10 watched Ads for 2011 on YouTube

Now before you click remember the following:

• There are 250mil consumers age 14 and above in the US.
• Views are not Uniques. The are total views. 
• A major national brand will pay millions if not billions to reach 100 million plus people more than once.
• A Superbowl Ad runs $3 million+ for a 30 sec spot to hopefully reach 60 million or more people at one shot.
• Major Brand Advertising Budgets run from $25million to over $1 Billion per year.
• There are hundreds and hundreds of ads created each year and put on TV and YouTube.
• Often in my opinion up to 50% of the YouTube views for advertising spots are by people in the Advertising/Marketing/Media Business.
• Views are accumulative. Meaning over the course of 1 year (or less) so most of these were not viral.
• Lastly views are world wide. Not US. So now think 2 billion consumers.

With all this information now when you see that the number 1 ad which was the VW 'Force' ad which was cute, entertaining, 'DOESN'T SELL THE CAR!', but also a Super Bowl ad that cost $3mil+ to air, reaching 45 million views should be easy. In fact in my view it underperformed.

Many of the other spots were more organic in their boost but they all aired on TV.

The number 10 spot for Adidas if you click has 4 million views. So in 1 full year they accumulated that number of views. So if this spot aired 7 weeks into 2011 it only had 88,888 views per week which is almost zero divided by 250mil or 2bil.

Summing this up since YouTube is world wide, and we have no idea about unique views, the FACT is:

NO ONE WATCHES ADVERTISING ON YOUTUBE