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YouTube's Growing Competition
bart_scriv writes "BusinessWeek looks at YouTube's rapidly growing imitators and questions the site's long-term viability. In addition to the competition, YouTube continues to face problems caused by its reliance on copyrighted material; the site's popularity is service- (rather than emotion-) based, which makes it a ripe target for anyone that might replicate and improve the service. From the article: 'YouTube's own challengers are advancing at a rapid rate. AOL is re-engineering its video site to mirror YouTube's success, and CNN is launching CNN Exchange, which will house user-contributed video features. Then there are sites like Eefoof.com, Panjea.com, Revver and Blip.TV, which share up to 50 percent of ad page revenue with the creator of the videos. Others like Dabble.com (currently in beta) sort through all video hosting sites (like YouTube and its competition) for search content, while specialty video sites like Pornotube concentrate on one point of interest.'"
Something important to note is that one user can upload videos to any or all of the top video sites. YouTube et al will have to offer some incentive for a user to stay with their service for the long term.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
but brand recognition is whats a winner here.
I am reminded of iPod killing headlines.
liqbase
Agreed. The only site I see that can come close to competing with YouTube is a site that offers content YouTube cannot allow.
Pretty amazing the article doesnt mention Google Video...it has to be one of Youtube's major competitors too. Has a simpler interface and better search...
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Forgive me if this is raised in TFA... but the brand that youtube now has is very important. If I want to see a video of some viral incident, or a TV trailer or clip, I turn to youtube, because I'm familiar with it. I've only just about heard of some of the others, never mind used them. Surely we saw the same effect in the search engine market... everyone knows that Google isn't necessarily the best, but I still go there first and only go somewhere else if I get no joy. The same will happen with youtube - just what can its competitiors offer that beats youtube? Easily accessible video at a good speed and with a big audience (to both see your footage and to upload their own interesting clips) is what it's for, and that's what they do well. Why go anywhere else? And naturally, the last thing I want is the fragmenting of the market, with different comaparable audiences at all sites, since then I'd have to search multiple sites instead of one.
There's yet another factor remaining, so I'm going to just wait and see. Maybe Youtube will do just fine without any further incentives.
The factor is: most me-too clones suck. There are a lot of PHBs... err... MBAs out there who seem to think that jumping on a bandwagon means doing the absolute crappiest job, with the cheapest unskilled monkeys off the street. And that you can just make up for that by adding some "features" that are just a PHBs ego trip, as opposed to even trying to understand what the market wants. (Think of all those dot-com era "features" like adding blinking text, or bright blue text on a green background.)
It's not just Google or Ebay. Look at the iPod or iTunes too, at that. (And disclaimer, I'm not even an iPod or Apple fan, but I can still be disgusted with _stupid_ imitation when I see it.)
E.g., you'd think that making yet another HDD based media player would be an easy enough proposition, no? Yet it took half a decade for people to even begin getting their act straight. Some were as big as a freaking brick (I still remember an Archos which was _literally_ as big as a 5" HDD), some had a nightmarish user interface (I'm looking at you, Creative), some insisted on ruining a perfectly good MP3 by re-converting it to their own proprieatry lossy compression in 64kbps (Sony, you suck), etc. And yet paradoxically a lot of them were actually more expensive than a similar capacity iPod. And when they tried adding a feature of their own, even one which might be useful in its own right, like video playback, it came at the expense of being badly implemented _and_ ending up costing more than a good laptop.
Ditto for iTunes. It never ceases to amaze me how many bad ideas people try to cram into copying that... badly. Ranging from the functionality of their program or web site, to the music selection, to some hare-brained ideas like, basically, "I know! People would love to pay for the privilege of indentured servitude to us! I bet everyone just dreams of a service where we hold their whole music collection hostage, and can remotely render it useless if they even think of stopping paying monthly." I mean, seriously, wtf? Who there thought that blatant extortion is a feature?
Those are just two random examples. I could give more, but it's already too long a rant anyway.
The moral is: don't underestimate how crappy a job some people can do when they try to copy something they don't even understand. I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of PHBs out there managed to get even copying Youtube wrong. It may seem like a clear and straightforward idea, that noone can possibly get wrong, but then the same could have been said about everything else which did get copied all wrong.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Do any of these copycats offer actual video downloads
To be fair, IMO the majority of videos on Youtube are cool to watch, but I see no reason to keep copies for eternity.
Unless of course you have an affinity to watching kids dance.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)