RT – FIRST TV NEWS CHANNEL IN HISTORY TO HIT BILLION VIEWS ON YOUTUBE

MOSCOW, JUNE 3, 2013 – RT’s YouTube channel becomes the first television news channel ever to reach the one billion views mark, confirming RT’s status as the top news content provider on the world’s largest video-sharing platform.

Robert Kyncl, Google VP and Head of Content for YouTube said that his organization is “thrilled that RT is getting to that number. It’s a massive landmark.” He noted that the key to success is “audience development…Programmers such as RT understanding that YouTube is different and that you have to program it slightly differently than the airwaves.” Kyncl added the payoff is seen in RT’s “numbers; it’s paying off in consumer adoption and response rates... It’s something that has to be both learned and earned and RT has been a great partner in that.” 

“RT, the Russian TV channel, is YouTube’s largest ‘news’ partner in the world,” said Danielle Tiedt, YouTube’s VP of marketing. “Very few of our partners can boast a billion video views, and RT will be the first news channel to get to this number. RT was one of the first channels to come to YouTube, back in 2007, and to create video content aimed specifically at ‘generation C’ – the kind of content that our users gladly watch and share.”

"A billion hits - that's a stunning result. From RT’s very first days we knew that in the nearest future the battle for viewers will be taking place on the Internet, on new platforms. This is why we are especially proud and happy to be the first. This is an amazing achievement for a Russian news channel – to become a major provider of news in the space that reaches the most important, young audience," said RT’s editor in chief Margarita Simonyan.

RT was the first Russian TV channel to launch a YouTube portal, in 2007. In 2011 RT’s news video became the most watched YouTube news item of year .  A 2012 study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism highlighted RT as by far the largest provider of news video footage on the platform. The research also concluded that RT produced the most popular individual videos . RT’s montage of eyewitness footage of the February 2013 Siberian meteor blast became the most watched video of the event on YouTube, accumulating more than 30 million views in less than a week.