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YouTube Growing ... Like Cancer?
PreacherTom writes "The success of YouTube has been staggering: they currently field 100 million videos per day and have attracted the attention of influential people like Bill Gates, who may be planning his own video hosting service. However, growth does not always equal profitability. Incorporation of ads risks their very base. If that were not enough, like Kazaa, they struggle with the Damocles' Sword of Litigation hanging over their head each day while bandwidth and server costs continue to rise. Is this phenomenal growth only rapidly killing our favorite video warehouse?" From the BusinessWeek article: "YouTube could easily alienate its users by overwhelming them with ads. And the startup has to figure out how to attract a broader group of marketers by filtering more for copyrighted or offensive videos and by creating more channels of similar content. Aware of the risks, YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are moving slowly to ramp up advertising. They have been wary of asking viewers to sit through a 30-second ad before a two- to three-minute clip. Instead, YouTube is developing new formats, like ones rolled out in August that let marketers build their own video channels or pay to place a video on YouTube's popular front page."
I made some lovely graphs to illustrate this growth. These graphs use actual thumbnails from youtube as data points.
That's right - the medium is the message!
If eBay made you click through ads before seeing an item's detail they'd lose a lot of visitors.
I don't know where you've been, but I'm running into these things constantly on eBay and paypal -- I'm taken to a full page ad I have to find the button to get past to go where I was intending to go, not this fscking billboard.
Alas, I'm still there because I want to buy, sell or pay for stuff, so I have to put up with it. If YouTube's offerings are good enough they can probably pull it off as long as they aren't making you sit through 30 seconds. 5 Seconds is a lot of time and if used well could accomplish what the sponsor wants.
Ad sponsors need to look beyond the current model of television/radio advertising. It's astounding where it has come from, back in the 40's and 50's the company often had a very direct hand in it's own advertising and it showed, by interferring with programming and rather stupid advertisements. Today most leave that to an agency which is very good at using sex or perception of inadequacy to sell everything from make-up to cars.
Besides, with the pay to be on the front page feature, I can see Coke, Dell, Revlon, whomever, creating their own guerilla videos, which are really ads in disguise, and peppering YouTube with them.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Charge a membership fee.
Now, before everyone goes bonkers, lets think about this critically. Servers, the power to run them, the buildings to house them, the people to keep them running, the people to write the code that makes the site run -- these are not free. If you don't have a huge wad of cash burning a hole in your bank, then you've got to find a source of funding, one which won't suddenly dry up and leave you with no way to run the show.
So charge for the service. Plumbers do it, lawyers do it (excessively it seems), hospitals do it... why not an Internet service? You pay your $20 a year and get free unlimited uploads. For those who don't like the model, you can have a free account, but we charge you a nickel for every upload. It might cut down on the megatons of crap that get uploaded, which would ease the strain on infrastructure and storage, generate constant revenue, which would ease money headaches, and generally improve things. And then, when YouTube gets so successful that it's ubiquitous, its CEO can embezzle huge amounts of money and leave the company broken while he sails away on his yacht.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Let's see, go bankrupt or alienate some visitors.
Unless it's worth going bankrupt over and having a heck of a time getting financed for the next project, I'd say it's not a hard decision to risk losing some visitors in order to not go bankrupt. It's pretty pathetic when owners of a large site believe in the bandwidth fairy and fail to recognize they're the fairy. They're the ones paying for it.
It's time to either start putting some limits in place to get costs below revenue or to raise revenue. And if some visitors can't deal with it, then good riddence to them. You don't need a bunch of leechers driving you into bankruptsy. They obviously don't care about you so why worry about them?
Work Safe Porn
Oh the vanity! People really do that??? If I want you to see my video I'll put it on my own site and mention it somewhere, maybe even slashdot and it it's interesting word will get around, if it's not, my ego won't be crushed. I will be pissed if those weasels at thinkgeek steal it for another merchandising product.
If you have video content that you want internet users to see, like a commercial, the front page of YouTube is a very, very good place to put it. Why? Because the people looking at the front page of YouTube are, by definition, people who both CAN and WANT TO look at videos on the internet.
It's otherwise hard to get video content to internet users. Many don't have the bandwidth or the software to play the video in the first place, others you risk angering by essentially taking over their sound system to display your ad.
People going to YouTube are already predisposed to WANT to watch videos. That's what they are there to do.
So, I'll go ahead and solve YouTube's problem for them: Like Google, have a 'paid placement' section alongside the rest of the videos. Let people pay to have their videos where people can see them. You might even let people pay to have videos display with ceretain keywords. Maybe I search for 'Dew' and along with the rest of the results, I get the latest Mt. Dew commercials. Just like I find the ads returned with search results on google HELPFUL when I'm using Google to search for a commercial service, I might find video ad results helpful when searching YouTube for videos.
Don't piss off your users by MAKING them watch, or by having the videos run automatically - leave it to the advertisers to generate YouTube commercials that are ENTERTAINING. Then let YouTube do what it does best - spread the word about entertaining videos.
There's also a bonus here - there's no reason that the person who charges the advertisers NEEDS to be YouTube directly. If I can buy placement for my video, I might get an advertiser to pay me to create a video, integrate their ad into my video, and then pay YouTube to make sure my video gets seen. You could create a whole new advertising medium where video producers effectively 'buy airtime' on YouTube through paid placement and then pay for that by selling commercials or product placement within their videos to other advertisers.
YouTube would then become essentially the TVGuide of internet video content: Everybody with an internet video gets a listing, but people who want to pay get the full-page ads.
paintball
In the pilot for the old Max Headroom series, Network 23 pioneered a new type of advertising called "blipverts", fast, tightly-compressed burst of audio-visual information designed to prevent viewers from switching channels. Unfortunately, they had the side effect of making their "perpetual, more slothful viewers literally explode" but a similar idea could work here. YouTube doesn't have the advantage of conventional television, where people are watching a minimum 30 minute show, and will sit through a 30 second commercial spot in order to get back to what they really want. YouTube is offering what are essentially extremely short TV shows as their primary product with no real possibility of a commercial interlude. On the other hand, a two second advertisement presented at the beginning, if entertaining (or startling) enough, might be very effective yet not turn viewers off to the service itself.
Heck, if they want this to really work they should offer a plan that would reward submitters for presenting typical YouTube videos formatted as advertising for specific products. Those videos could then be shown to advertisers, who could pay to have the ones they like presented to regular YouTube viewers as advertising.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.