Techcrunch reports that Rocketboom, a pioneer in the online video space, has made a distribution deal with Sony worth somewhere in the seven figure range. 

I'm bullish about online video and while I've never been a fan of Rocketboom I understand why many people like it.  I do think it's gotten quite a bit better since host Joanne Colan came aboard.  That said, seven figures is a vast over valuation in my opinion.

This reminds me of a story that was covered by the LA Times a while back about a Youtube phenomenon named Fred.  Fred is a teenage kid pretending to be a hyper-active 6 year old while sporting an extremely high pitch voice.  His videos get, on average, somewhere in the area of 3 million views a piece. 

But given his audience is probably made up of 14 year old I think it's safe to assume many if not most of his viewers watch the show multiple times. 

His YouTube channel has about 364,000 subscribers which I think is a safe bet as far as how many unique viewers he actually has (its not unreasonable to think a 14 year old would watch something they like 10 or 12 times)

Now to put this in perspective, lets look at some population numbers.  The U.S. alone has about 53 Million kids between the ages of 5 and 13 according to the census bureau.  Of those kids, 71.9 % or 38.2 Million of them have Internet access according to InternetWorldStats.com.  So even if we assume Fred has absolutely no fans outside the U.S. (which is unlikely) his audience is still only a little over half a percent of the total available viewing audience (about .64% in case you were curious). 

Overall, Fred's actual footprint is pretty small.  Much smaller than say, your average TV show. 

Which brings me back to Rocketboom.  It might seem odd to spend most of my post on Rocketboom talking about someone else but I wanted to set a baseline.  Having done so I can now present these numbers...

Now, it's important to remember that Rocketboom has other means of distribution but visiting their home page opens the YouTube video by default so one would think this would be a large source of their viewings. 

Given that fact the numbers above are nothing short of dismal.  Keep in mind the point I made above which is that "Internet numbers" need to be put in their proper perspective.  Internet video is easier to consume, easier to distribute and usually comes in a form that lends itself to multiple viewings.  All those differences make it much harder to equate normal markers to actual people (as opposed to something like TV where 1 viewing almost certainly corresponds to one actual person). 

So you could easily cut the above numbers in half and still have fairly optimistic estimates.  Given that fact I don't see how Sony plans to make enough money to justify a seven figure guarantee.  I'll happily eat my words if I'm wrong but this seems like classic "bubble behavior" to me.