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July 18, 2006
YouTube Rules;What can libraries learn?
Reuters is reporting (Sunday July 16) these 10 facts about YouTube:
1. YouTube, the leader in Internet video search, viewers are now watching more than 100 million videos per day on its site.
2. YouTube holds the leading position in online video with 29 percent of the U.S. multimedia entertainment market (according to Hitwise).
3. "YouTube videos account for 60 percent of all videos watched online"
4. Just like public libraries YouTube videos are delivered free. Mot YouTube videos are short (minutes really) and usually homemade although some professional viral videos have entered the fray of late.
5. MySpace has about a 19 percent share while Yahoo, MSN, Google and AOL have about 3 percent each by Hitwise's reckoning.
6. In June 2006, 2.5 billion videos were watched on YouTube.
7. YouTube does ths with just over 30 employees.
8. Over 65,000 videos are now uploaded daily to YouTube, up from around 50,000 in May.
9. YouTube boasts nearly 20 million unique users per month, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.
10. In less than a year YouTube has grown from 58,000 visitors in August, 2005 to 20 million unique visitors in June 2006.
Growth is still up in the air. It is reported that it costs $1,000,000/month in server costs for YouTube. They've just started adding ads in partnership with NBC. They have $11.5 million in VC funding.
Are we ready for small and long videos served up from web services through our sites and discovery tools?
Other players in this crowded space include Veoh, Vimeo, Grouper, Mojoflix, eefoof and Lulu TV.
What are the secrets of this early success that libraries might learn from:
a. YouTube was an early player in MySpace and captured the huge Millennial market's imaginaton and talents. Some libraries are here and testing the waters.
b. YouTube paid attention to social networking as a trend and added those features to its site. Are we ready for this? OCLC is talking about social networks being a major focus of their next research project.
c. YouTube keeps the whole lot of creative videos - good and awful -and can search and serve up the long tail. We've got the long tail of collections...
d. Despite not being publicly for for-profit activities such as viral advertising, YouTube has tolerated some of it. Are we ready for some new funding models yet?
e. YouTube has been consistent in its branding while having a little fun with it too. Are we humourless or fun? Can we point to consistent visual branding on our bricks and clicks?
e. And as TechCrunch put it so succinctly: "YouTube is simple, easy, works well enough and people like it - there may be no more mystery than that."
I've noted before that there are a few videos on YouTube about libraries. Maybe its viral enough for us too.
Either way, we're seeing a hint of the video future here. Worth paying attention to.
Stephen
Posted by stephen at July 18, 2006 3:55 PM
Comments
YouTube got where it is by turning a blind eye to copyright in the early days. It wouldn't be nearly as popular if it wasn't for all the copyrighted music videos and other copyrighted things.
Posted by: Adam at December 29, 2007 12:51 PM