Amassing nearly 100 million views in its first nine days and earning the producers of the program a serendipitous windfall that could already be in the millions.
The YouTube clip got massive play on U.S. cable television and made the 48-year-old Boyle whose performance was a mere first-round audition, after all into an international star whose career in an instant seems assured, no matter what the outcome of the British talent show she is the odds-on favorite to win.
As a contestant, Boyle would likely not have a piece of the action yet. And it isn't clear what deal Cowell, a judge and producer of the show, and his label, Sony/BMG have with YouTube as part of their revenue-sharing deal. If it's half a cent per play a typical figure for such deals that would translate into a $500,000 payday so far. And if Google sold a decent amount of video overlays on the video (earning an estimated $20 per thousand views), Cowell and company could be owed millions more in revenue sharing.
The tsunami of interest in a single YouTube clip could not have come at a better time for YouTube, which is aggressively trying to shed its reputation as a repository for mindless clips uploaded by self-absorbed users. It appears to be a platform where Hollywood and advertisers can do serious business, without alienating the millions of people who have made it what it is today.
This might be the perfect storm: A feel-good story that generates a wild amount of traffic and attracts new users precisely as the company doubles down on its reputation as a music destination as well as a nascent TV and studio film portal.
All of this happened in under a week and a half. By comparison, Avril Lavigne's “Girlfriend" YouTube's current reigning champion took more than two years to accumulate its tally of 118 million views (and required some gaming of the system by her fans to do so).
Boyle's performance currently has 70 million views on YouTube's first search-result page alone, and multiple estimates have pegged the total number of views at around 100 million and still climbing steeply over the weekend. If YouTube's audio fingerprinting technology works as advertised, Cowell and company will get paid when people watch the user-uploaded videos, in addition to the official version.
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