Could YouTube Become as Big as CBS or Viacom?

Within the next five years, Google’s YouTube could generate $15 billion or more in annual revenue — which would make it about the same size as CBS or Viacom, a Wall Street analyst predicts.

“We think the odds are extremely high that YouTube will be a large, profitable and highly consequential business” in the next few years, Sanford Bernstein senior analyst Carlos Kirjner wrote in a research. “It is becoming an attractive and important medium for brand advertisers, and we think it will increasingly compete (with traditional media companies) for the incremental video-delivered brand advertising dollars.” The vidsite now streams 6 billion hours of video to more than 1 billion unique users per month across the globe. In the U.S., YouTube now reaches a bigger audience of adults 18-34 than any single TV network, global head of content Robert Kyncl said.