Got bored of YouTube?
Nov 21st, 2006 by Simon
I got curious to see how many YouTube wannabe sites have been created - not for any good reason really, to be honest. But, having looked at this comparison of site traffic I just wondered…
After all, isn’t video on the web the real killer?
The ‘video killed the radio star’ of the new millennium?
And, if so, how many other people have tried to get on the bandwagon?
And, do they get any traffic?
Well, here’s what I found so far - add in with comments if you know of more…
I was going to look at web traffic, but reading more detail on the realities of Alexa, I realise that it’s only useful as a comparative measure, and even then it could be heavily biased!
Anyway, proved my fragile point that there’s loads of them and even glancing at the data from Alexa, you see that none get a fraction of the hits that YouTube is getting. But then, very few of them have probably had any PR at all - and YouTube is mentioned almost daily now.
Which is an interesting truth in itself - being first and being noticed by the press is the real tipping point for all these sites!
A couple more:
Break.com
Yahoo Video
Heavy.com
Sharkle
ClipShack
Ziddio (by Comcast)
Metacafe
Vimeo
Atom Films
AddictingClips.com
…and who knows how many more.
Someone suggested to me a comparison between YouTube and Yahoo, that Yahoo the leading search engine was surpassed by Google through better innovation and user experience, and that the same could happen to YouTube.
It feels to me that its a matter of content: its dominance now is self perpetuating in that its got more content on it than anyone else, and draws more people looking for and thus adding to.
And with Google money & resources, YouTube should be able to keep the user experience a good while also bringing in more content beyond the “stupid homemade clips”.
That said, I recently posted a minute long video for Motorola to a dozen video sites including Metacafe, a little known one. The video barely got 1000 views on YouTube and even less on Google Video and others. But it got a surprising 1 million views on Metacafe!!!
The only way I can explain it is probably because the amount of content in Metacafe was a lot smaller of a pool, so the likelihood of a user finding that video was higher, more people viewed it, rankings went up, caught the attention of the site editors, who then made it video of the day, then week, then month, all guaranteeing exponential growth in views.
And it wasn’t that good a video!
May have been a fluke of the emerging and not fully understood online video world.
From a marketing perspective…I think advertisers and agencies are too quick to see online and online video as meaning we can now do TV spots and TV video and toss it on the web and surround it with some flash design for good measure.
Anything is possible online but to “get it” doesn’t mean tossing up traditional work and leaving it be.
Tjeck out, the Skype guys new venture “The Venice Project”, which is a quite different business model to YouTubes.
http://www.theveniceproject.com/
and an article
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jul2006/db20060724_713810.htm?chan=top+news_top+news
Casper
one worth mentioning is a bloombox, which is a sort of ’skinnable’ youtube for media organisations who want to harness UGC
first implementation is ‘islandoo’www.islandoo.com - a place where people can audition for a TV.
http://www.bloombox.com
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