“Google and YouTube…YouToogle, integration and content creation”

For anyone who has used YouTube you probably now know that Google owns it. You could have had it too for a cool 1.65 billion and change. I’m sure every tech and net blog out there is rambling on about it.

Well it is big news. YouTube is a relatively fresh company and it has dominated the online video arena. I blogged about it previously in “becoming your own broadcaster”. To be honest they rock. They know exactly how to get people online. Make it simple.

Sounds easy doesn’t it. Well YouTube’s uniqueness is that they can take any quality movie and, flowing their simple instructions and guidelines, post it to the web for all to see and, more importantly for all to share. It is this interconnectedness that helps drive their site.

You post your video and you have a list of similar types of videos (based on keywords and grouping settings) to peruse as well. So not only can you show your own friends via a YouTube generated hyperlink, but YouTube has this internal distribution setup that ties it into other peoples pages for more view-ability.

Cool. I tried it too. Here is a short clip of a dance production called “Studio 34” for the Thirty Something Dance Co-operative I covered for the group. As you can see it’s a nice simple integration and only took a few minutes to upload.

Some would say that Google buying YouTube is also a nice simple integration. I’d say yes and no. Google tried it’s own video upload site but YouTube’s dominance far out shadowed it. I’m sure Google spent lots of time and money trying to do something similar. So if you can’t beat them, but them!

It’s been said that YouTube has not been making money due to lack of advertising on the site but now that Google is in, I’d say that it’s time to cash in. The potential is enormous but that is also the reason for YouTube’s success.

Simplicity, lack of editorial handling and ad free make YouTube popular. I’m sure the heads at Google know that current and future YouTubers will have little patience for messing with their content and how it’s viewed. YouTube’s meteoric rise could quickly do a 180 is we have to watch a 10 second intro advertisement every time we want to watch a video. I don’t think that will happen. I have lots of patience but even I start thinking of clicking away when I have to wait through an ad to view something.

So what does this all mean for us at CM Creative? Well, I’ve been so busy with projects that I’ve been waiting to show video samples but maybe this is a guerrilla method to post some extra content in the meantime.

Try it yourself. Everything is out there and everyone is watching. Apparently the eighty year old grumpy guy video blog rant they talked about on CBC this morning had two million views. That is 2000000 views! There’s probably a few thousand more after that broadcast too. Get out there, create, upload and expose.

CM
www.cmcreative.ca