With all the talk of Pandora, Spotify, and other online music services, it’s often missed that YouTube is the largest online music service. According to new data from ComScore, nearly 60% of YouTube’s audience comes from music videos. Vevo was the No. 1 YouTube channel in July with approximately 60 million viewers and Warner Music was No. 2 with 31.5 million viewers.

Music fans can find the songs they want on YouTube with a few keystrokes, and they don’t have to sit through a stopset to get to their content of choice.

Perhaps radio airplay is a significant driver of specific music video views on YouTube. A quick comparison of YouTube’s top ten videos up against the top spun songs for the week according to MediaBase shows that six of the top ten songs on YouTube were also in the top ten most spun in MediaBase.

YouTube is smart about exploiting their position in the music industry too.

At the top of their site, the navigation links are: Videos, Music, Shows, Trailers, Live, and Education. Go to the music section, and you’ll find a well targeted page with recommendations based on the videos you’ve viewed in the past. Plus, YouTube will recommend concerts in your area.

Much like MTV’s peak years, the continued success of YouTube isn’t only about the music. There are some creative personalities emerging as well.

There is a healthy peppering of content from other creative producers like Mike O’Brien from "Saturday Night Live." He invites celebrities into his closet for short interviews. His YouTube channel is called 7 Minutes in Heaven. It is hilariously low budget and very entertaining. He’s had Jason Sudeikis, Hoda Kotb, Amy Pohler, Ty Burrell, and a number of other big names in his closet for YouTube fun. His videos have been viewed 671,127 times on YouTube. See his YouTube channel.

Approximately 3.7 million people have viewed this young creative Baltimore native’s “so bad, they’re good” YouTube videos more than 48 million times. Brandon Hardesty does impersonations of well known actors (some of the impersonations are better than others), movie reenactments, and short films. I particularly enjoyed the reenactment of Charlie Brown’s Christmas.

YouTube isn’t just leaving it up to the crowd to come up with content, either. Earlier this year, it partnered with a company called Machinima to create content for video gamers. Machinima’s how-to videos for gamers earned nearly 17 million unique viewers in March, which makes it the third largest channel on the site. Their audience is predominantly young males.

Demand Media is another major producer of non-music content for YouTube. Its channels include eHow, Livestrong.com, and Expert Village, all totaling more than 3.2 billion network video views.

Of course, YouTube has unique advertising capabilities that MTV never had. It can feed targeted ads to the right viewers. Gamers get ads from video game marketers. Music fans get ads that are music-related, etc. It is also capable of serving geo-targeted ads. The ad inventory expands and contracts with the amount of audience coming to the site. Various analysts suggest that YouTube will earn more than $1.75 billion in ad revenue in 2011 (not far from what Google paid for the site in 2006).

Perhaps the most exciting fact related to YouTube’s position as “the new” MTV is that the channel is wide open. The only people and videos that would make it to the air on MTV were closely vetted by the MTV programming team. At YouTube, everyone gets air time. But airtime doesn’t mean that you’ll automatically get viewers.
It’s equal opportunity airtime. Are you taking advantage of it?