YouTube Rentals Fall Flat During Early Beta Period

Posted 05/03/2010 at 12:16pm | by Paul Lilly

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It appears YouTube's little experiment with video rentals may not be long for this world, not at the current pace anyway. Google's online video service continues to put the pieces in place to attract customers, including beefing up its catalog with critically acclaimed hits (3:10 to Yuma, for example) and adding titles from Lionsgate, but none of it seems to be working so far.

YouTube has stopped displaying the play count of rentals on its site, and with good reason. NewTeeVee.com claims they were able to obtain numbers for many of YouTube's rental titles, such as the above mentioned 3:10 to Yuma, which was only streamed a miserable 53 times in the course of a week.

Unfortunately for YouTube, 3:10 to Yuma's performance wasn't an aberration, but par for course. Saw, for example, only saw 40 rentals in the same time span, while Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs was only viewed 101 times even though it's being streamed for $1.99 versus the regular price of $3.99. The most popular title in YouTube's rental store -- Precious -- was only streamed 1,421 times, while the tenth most popular title -- Air Guitar Nation -- was viewed 235 times.

"It's going really well so far," said Anna Richardson, YouTube's Communications Manager

Richardson points out that this is still just an early beta of YouTube's rental program there hasn't been much effort to advertise the service, so these numbers aren't necessarily disappointing. Time will tell if she's right or not.