YouTube is worth more than US$70bn

YouTube has been valued at over US$70 billion, $55 million more than the entire global recorded music industry last year.

It’s also worth more than all but 66 companies on the US’ S&P 500, an index of 500 stocks chosen for market size, liquidity and industry grouping.

The valuation was made by Bank Of America analystJustin Post on Thursday, in a report shared with Bloomberg. The paper also states that revenues will increase again this year by 34% to US$8.2bn. It predicts that by 2017 revenues will increase to US$13bn and that the big driver is mobile; its revenue from mobile jumped 100% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2015.

In mobile rankings in the US, YouTube has the second highest average time spent on the app at four hours per month per user; it’s tied with Instagram and above Twitter (two hours). Pandora had the highest usage in the US with 23 hours per user per month, followed by Facebook with 22 hours.

The video streaming giant has been criticised by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's (IFPI) chief executive Frances Moore for abusing safe harbour exemptions in the DMCA around user generated content.Moore pointed out that YouTube pays creators just a fraction of what Spotify and Deezer pay. However at ten-years-old, YouTube draws over 1bn regular users and with its parent company Google – which purchased YouTube in 2006 for US$1.65bn – valued at US$370bn, it’s now the biggest music service website in the world.

The report comes as Google reveals its digital media store Google Play now has 1bn active users, with 50bn app installs in the past 12 months. The announcement was made at its annual I/O Conference in San Francisco yesterday.

Last week YouTube revealed the launch of its subscription version, Music Key, has been delayed until September 15. The delay was made togive beta testers more time with the system.