YouTube's 'clip culture'

YouTube CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley said his video-sharing site is encouraging what he calls a "clip culture."

In an era of limited attention spans and abundant choices, his assessment of society as online video comes of age is right on the money. These days, as television networks are attempting to redefine themselves with costly, long-form productions just to maintain their audiences, let alone grow them. YouTube's short-form and low-quality audience-generated videos are attracting about 20 million unique visitors a month. The average video length viewed is 2 1/2 minutes long, said Hurley. Changing the way society behaves is a big feat in and of itself. But it's unclear whether YouTube can make a living doing so. Today, YouTube gets money from banner ads. It's also struck a deal with NBC to promote that network's shows. When I asked Hurley what else YouTube can do for the major networks, he said that the site can be a platform for all the video that's typically on DVDs, such as behind the scene takes and bloopers. Hurley and I chatted after his panel at the Always On. One obvious way for YouTube to make money -- before burning it all away on delivering the video for the world -- is to place 5-second post-roll advertisements on those 100 million video clips being viewed each day. Yet Hurley doesn't want to do that. To me, inserting advertisements into the videos seems inevitable. Auctioning the placements in the video ads is a business process that also seems inevitable to me. Another model is to get sponsors for groups. Yet another is to either get paid by marketers when users recommend certain products.

Go MarketWatch, and read my Net Sense column for my video interview with Hurley and the rest of the column. Read BF's Net Sense.

Comments

[Ken Leebow]

Interesting article and YouTube is amazing, but I find that identifying the incredible stuff is almost impossible . . . so, as the author of the the 300 Incredible Things to Do on the Internet book series, I have created www.IncredibleVideos.net. It gets people to incredible videos instantly -- things adults might be interested in -- people who are not even aware of YouTube's existence.

It's brand new and light on content, but I hope to have thousands of hours of incredible video. I think it will challenge traditional TV.

Also, I think the major networks are missing out on a huge opportunity. For example, I enjoy CBS Sunday Morning Show. It has incredible interviews with musicians. They have a treasure-trove of interviews. However, they are nowhere to be found. Of course, the above example is true of many TV segments.

PS. If anyone knows of incredible videos, e-mail them to me @ Leebow@gmail.com.

[Matthew Cook]

One problem YouTube has with advertising is some of the basic rules with the DMCA.

Pre and post rolls will work with “original” user generated content but they will get into trouble if they “attach” the ad to an unlicensed video clip. As you may have noticed -- YouTube puts the ad elsewhere to play it safe, i.e., on the search result page.

Actually, in my opinion, they even need to get the user’s permission to attach a pre or post roll ad. And, they should generate a revenue split with them…

Right now YouTube et al. have some legal protection regarding copyrighted material. The Safe Harbor rule -- i.e., "online service provider safe harbors" created by Congress as part of the DMCA.

Now they have to stay away from directly attaching an ad to the copyrighted video.

They lose the safe harbor if it "receives a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, etc. etc. if they can control that said activity."

My theory is that they will have to find other ways to advertise, such as, more splash and search pages before and after the said video clip plays… (to play it safe)

Matt

[idonothingallday]

YouTube is great and has tremendous reach but to describe their content as "user generated" is a bit of a farce considering the amount of copyrighted material. Anyone actively persuing an online video production will only use Youtube as a free marketing program using teaser clips.

one side of the online video space that is getting overlooked in the YouTube haze is file quality. Sure the Flash player has better penetration but start to compare Quicktime files with Flash files for video quality. Maybe some office computers don't get Quicktime but anyone at home with a good or better computer and a broadband connection will (or should) have the Quicktime player.

It is by far the best player out in the market. Where is the press touting that fact?

[Marcus]

All though the YouTube CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley is right on what is currently happing, he is overlooking the why of it. Simply put the internet will do what the internet does- and when streaming long form
content becomes cost effective to large audience (TV size large), and it will, people will keep it on their monitors and watch it- as long as it fills the need they are watching for in the first place. This viewing time may be hours or days. This was proven out in several long form events such as the CBS March Madness, World Cup, etc.

[Ian]

Putting 5 secs ad-rolls in video wouldn't be a wise choice in my opinion. The Internet users have the ability to move quite fast from one service to another, expecially if they feel bothered by this kind of advertising. The short-form isn't the key of youTube success I think. As somebody mention before, youtube dosen't really protect the copyright owners since a good amount of the content you can find there is clearly a republishing of copyrighted material.
On the other hand, In the last few month i've seen a considerably growth of traditional TV broadcasters putting their live contents on the web. Internet broadcasting, unlike the traditional one, is really, really cheap, pratically inconsistent cost for any broadcasting network. In fact there are a few website that collects and show this traditional TV stations broadcasts via IPTV ( Streamick.com for instance ) and it looks like some big brands, such as ABC, HBO or ESPN, are starting to use this new systems for deliver their free contents massively, as well for minor TV stations.

[marcus]

Ian,
Thank you for responding to my post.

Among other things, you said:

"On the other hand, In the last few month i've seen a considerably growth of traditional TV broadcasters putting their live contents on the web. Internet broadcasting, unlike the traditional one, is really, really cheap, pratically inconsistent cost for any broadcasting network."

Traditional over-the-air, cable, and satellite broadcasting is a far more cost effective way of reaching large audiences than Internet-based broadcasting. With these traditional broadcast approaches, broadcaster costs are independent of the number of people who watch. Thus, while putting up a broadcast antenna or building and launching a satellite doesn't make sense for broadcasting to a small audience for a short period of time, such investments do make tremendous sense for broadcasting to large audiences for extended periods of time. This is because you can amortize your costs -- the greater the number of people who tune in, the less it costs you per person to deliver the broadcast.

While you are right that traditional broadcasters are beginning to look seriously at using the Internet as another kind of broadcast technology, cost is actually one of the most significant barriers they face. This is because with most of today's Internet broadcasting solutions, broadcasts costs rise with increasing audience sizes. Simply put, the more people who watch or listen to an online broadcast the more expensive it gets. As a broadcaster you buy bandwidth for each and every person listening or watching, so with each new viewer or listener there is a incremental cost increase. The more successful you are at attracting viewers the more your costs increase. With small audiences this is not a problem, but when you try to reach "television size" audiences, the costs become prohibitive.

As an example, CBS's March Madness limited the number of viewers who could tune in at any one time to a little over 1/4 million people -- which is not even a one share by today's TV standards -- even though this was a nationally promoted event and there were many thousands of people in the "waiting room" trying to watch the event. The ONLY reason a network such as CBS implemented this kind of "rationing" of access to the video stream is because of the costs involved in delivering the programming.

There is an overwhelming need for an online broadcast solution that can dramatically reduce the costs of delivering television-style linear feeds. We believe the answer to this dilemma lies in distributed broadcast solutions, which spread the bandwidth costs of delivering a broadcast out among the viewers interested in watching that broadcast. When implemented properly, such systems can be "free" to the end-user, since they utilize the upstream bandwidth the end-user is already paying for in his or her monthly Internet access bill.

In other words, to make large-scale television-style programming practical over the Internet, broadcasters need a Vonage or Skype-like solution -- only instead of delivering telephone calls, the system would deliver audio/video broadcast streams.

Thank you

[Tabs]

What is clip culture? It is jast interesting)))