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April 04, 2006
What should YouTube do?
YouTube is the Doogie Howser of social media companies: bright, precocious and leapfrogging into the world faster than its peers.
Look at how fast it's grown up. Just 31 days ago, I charted how YouTube was threatening to surpass the New York Times in reach. About a week later, YouTube swooshed past the venerable Times.
(Don't look at the Alexa charts for numbers, which are rather inexplicable; since Alexa's data is from a common sample pool, it's best used for comparisons.)
In fact, it would seem that YouTube is handily beating nearly all of the traditional media outlets for traffic.
And it's threatening to surpass the entire Go.com network, which includes media heavyweights ABC, ABC News, ESPN, Disney and Movies.com.
YouTube is even slapping Walmart around when it comes to traffic.
Only MySpace, the King Kong of social networking, has a sizeable lead over YouTube for traffic. Coincidentally, their fever lines of growth are nearly perpendicular.
Other than a few content partnerships, YouTube doesn't sell anything. So with all that traffic, what should YouTube do now to cement its position in the world? Become an advertising powerhouse? A video distributor? Sell stuff? Become a software company? Get acquired and if so, by whom?
And what shouldn't it do?
Clearly, lots of people love Doogie YouTube. So, in keeping with the theme that the congregation is smarter than the preacher, let's help YouTube figure out its next move.
Write your ideas in the comments, or create your own post and trackback to this one, or email your thoughts to ben (at) customerevangelists.com). If we get enough ideas, we'll put together an ebook and make it freely available here and send it to YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.
Update: Om Malik has an update about YouTube securing more funding, and commentors to his post speculate on how much time the company has to start making money.
Update 2: Some new stats delivered April 9, courtesy of the AP: About 35,000 new videos are posted daily at YouTube. About 35 million videos are watched per day, most lasting 30 seconds to 2.5 minutes. Just four months ago, visitors were posting about 8,000 videos a day with 3 million total daily views.
Technorati Tags: YouTube, Social media, Marketing, Advertising
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Now that YouTube has a number of their users uploading copyrighted material, and the broadcast networks starting to insist upon them removing them all, I think their first move has to be to survive. I don't think they should take the attitude of Napster, which everybody cheering from the outside, while they were shut down.
While they have been cooperating, the industry is in a similar place that the music industry was when Napster was so successful. Now they are blaming the DVRs for their loss of advertising revenue, but they are now looking at YouTube as a threat.
YouTube should really concentrate on making alliances with these entities before anything else, if the networks are willing to do it. If they don't, and the networks get proactive in pursuing them, the rest of the strategies probably won't matter.
Is it just me, or is YouTube a permission marketing gold mine? They have the opportunity to be so much more than television has the capability of being in the near future.
Why?
Tags.
I think it makes sense that YouTube would provide fundamentals for companies to create short infomercials that are tagged. This would create relevance between their product and a video showing a comparable item being used. I watch a video of someone doing incredible yo-yo tricks, I might see an option to view an infomercial showing the benefits of a particular brand of yo-yo with a few demonstrations and a link to buy from their website.
hollywood reporter did a good story on youtube two weeks ago, addresses the question of cooperation w/ networks and future biz model. here's the link:
http://tinyurl.com/zmzoq
all i can say is: if they start serving ads before or after the vids, it's over. you tube works because YOU'RE NOT FORCED TO WATCH ANY FRICKIN' ADS unless you want to.
Owen, but what if the only ads YouTube would accept were community-created?
I imagine that the marketing metrics YouTube could quantify and cross-tabulate based on profile information could be staggering and just the sort of data some companies would pay handsomely for.
Youtube can:
push content and help (!) advertisers perform better in the rankings
Offer focus group like metrics, not only with ratings but if a clip is seen to the end, when do viewrs roam away, how excited where they after [recommand, same, rate, etc]
be micro paiemnt based: 2¢ a clip, buy 100 clips in advance. At 35 viewings per day, that makes 70k. Enough to keep the engine running.
The companies that are mosted vested in YouTube's success are those that have the greatest evangelical following - Apple, TiVo, Starbucks, etc. As such, these companies could form a sponsorship-style relationship similar to how NPR operates. They could also cross-promote CGM amongst their customer base, driving even more traffic to YouTube.
I haven't been up to much these days. Today was a loss. Nothing seems important. I've just been letting everything happen without me these days.
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