YouTube has opened a new section of its site called Colleges on YouTube. Students, staff and alumni of 30 universities can access video from their school community by using a .edu email address and other users can’t access those pages. Users are encouraged to suggest that their school be added to the list. This strategy has clearly been successful for Facebook, probably the 2nd most recognized online social network in the US with separate sections for more than 2000 schools. Just like Facebook is moving away from its initially closed nature, though, it makes little sense to me to see YouTube launching private sections on what was initially a viral video site. A closed college section is to the rest of the site like a suburban gated community is to a hip downtown scene.
I can’t help but think that a college section is appealing because it will keep out the freaks (and pirates) that make YouTube so lively. More Tea Partay, less 66Six. And thus more profitable advertising, in the short term at least.
The theory is that walled gardens for colleges make relevant content easier for insiders to find and less likely to be viewed by outsiders. In reality though, alumni accounts and the basic portability of data on the web mean that it’s not very hard to access the content and posting Facebook profiles elsewhere on the web has become standard gossip blogger practice. A degree of privacy on Facebook may be an antiquated idea from the days when online social networks were new. The .edu email login may be little more than an inconvenience to casual contact and collaboration - anyone who really wants to can get into the system. Things are changing at Facebook - its recent API release indicates that in some ways the company wants now to take the lead in opening up.
Creating closed sections of your site for large communities is not the direction the best of the web it going in. YouTube is known and loved not just as a site to upload videos, but as a place to find and spread video freely. Photosharing site Webshots demoted their College Live section from its own tab to a drop down menu item on the front page in this week’s redesign. Given that College Live rolled out in April, downplaying it in the end of August may indicate that it was a summer time experiment that wasn’t well received.
Webshots has said that video sharing will soon join photo sharing on its site. Hopefully Flickr and Zooomr will be next in offering video support. The line between photo and video is blurring, the line between inside and outside social sites is blurring - so why would YouTube draw another line around college users?
Though it was a trailblazer in user uploaded video community, the site is facing a growing anti-Paris Hilton (corporate influence) revolt and in this move seems to be moving backwards as well. Perhaps this fledgling section will wither on the vine or perhaps the freaks will move on to other sites.
Welcome back to School. The motto catch them when they are young has worked well for Apple especially with the iPod. This is Great strategic move for YouTube. Web 2.0 rocks. The users are the controllers.
Being in higher ed, I can definitely say this is a bad move and here’s why.
Schools and universities are historically afraid of technology and new emerging trends (ie: social networking). Instead of sectioning off a popular technology to entice them, these sites should reach out to the schools to get them to participate in the full community. This is letting higher ed get away with what they always get away with, which is not paying attention to what the kids want and what the kids do.
So, this also means that a college video from youtube cannot be integrated into an external blog/site. I’m guessing that it’d be disallowed? Is that so?
“Creating closed sections of your site for large communities is not the direction the best of the web it going in.”
Claiming the web will change the “exclusive club” mentality that is ingrained in humanity, seems as short signted as claiming stocks will only go up in 1999.
I’m more interested to see when they release something like “TV Tube” for TV shows.
But this will build passionate groups who’ll TALK about their community.
They could also do the same for corporate email groups and maybe allow interlinking - something like allowing a person to be a memeber of stanford and google.
Why are you saying the “line between photos and videos is blurring”? To be honest, I’d rather not see Flickr and Zooomr include video or whatever other sidetrack functionality that could faintly be linked to photography. Flickr as it is now is a platform for enthusiastic photographers and I bet that not many of them are avid filmers, it’s a different thing!
There’s no reason why users shouldn’t have control of where their video is displayed. It won’t serve TechCrunch’s goals of growing Web2 faster at all costs, but it may serve users better.
YouTube might be able to make selective content distribution a lot more mainstream than it is. So far, it’s pretty tough to show information to some people but not others. Flickr does an OK job with friends/family, though I don’t know how broadly used the features are. Multiply.com does a great job but they’re not that big (but check alexa, they’re growing nicely). If YouTube’s UI for _showeveryone_ vs. _showfellowstudents_ is simple and effective, they may have made a very worthwhile step forward.
Methinks that YouTube actually wants to reduce the number of total video views since that costs them money. Economically speaking, they probably want to have fewer, more targeted viewers. While it’s nice to boast about 100 million videos served a day, they may want a more controlled environment to turn around the cash burn.
Just a thought.
My guess is that this move makes sense, for a bunch of reasons, but one of the most important being a slashback against Facebook - you play on our turf, we’re gonna play on your turf - for keeps - UFC-style.
Sometimes the best defense is a good offense.
Surely if people want to find their college they can just search for it? Or view the appropriate tag even.
I just find it interesting their example e-mail address when trying to sign up cites the sjsu.edu domain (San Jose State University), which is not among the initial list of colleges.
This is a step forward for YouTube in offering targeted Ads. Now students or people with “higher education” will ONLY be the ones watching these videos, I’m sure they’ve done the market research to find out what ads will work best.
I don’t think its a bad move at all, they have done very good market segmentation … according to wikipedia…
“Substantial: the segment has to be large and profitable enough”: Over 7 mil
“Accessible: it must be possible to reach it efficiently”: Heh, um .. internet!
“Differential: it must respond differently to a different marketing mix” … college students have unique needs and wants
“Actionable: you must have a product for this segment” … tons of advertisers targeting here
“Measurable: size and purchasing power can be measured” … yup.
Community sites today serve a group of exhibitionists.
Mainstream people are afraid of contributing to social sites because they’re afraid the wrong people will see their content. A person who is looking for a job may find that a Google search of their name turns up something horrifying. I know someone who has created dozens of blogs and wikis that were password protected because people were afraid they’d get read. (Funny enough, those dozens of blogs and wikis get about one post a week.)
Even behind the firewall, you’ll find that many people are afraid to use a document management system. They’re afraid of transparency, even with their co-workers.
If social systems are going to get more contributors, they need a way to get past people’s fears; YouTube may be going forward to 2008, not back to 2004.
YouTube has to keep ‘innovating’ (adding new features of any kind) to stay popular and fresh (and above water financially), so hey, let ‘em try it.
I have to wonder if part of what YouTube is reaching for is more involvement from professors. In other words, professors releasing exclusive class content (Recorded lectures, video notes, etc) on their university only section, in the hope that only their students will be capable of viewing it.
Putting these things on YouTube is advantageous, since it relieves most Universities’ server hardware of the traffic they’d otherwise recieve.
That, coupled with regional targeted ads (as the other commenter stated above) may be what they’re getting at. I’m probably wrong, but it’s worth a thought.
> Creating closed sections of your site for large communities is not the direction the best of the web it going in.
oh please, get off your high horse. If everyone got to hear and see every type of content that others created, a lot of valuable content would never be added to the web. Maybe I don’t want to share my video with the world, but I’m comfortable enough with sharing it at my school (or my family, or my bay area dog walking group, or whatever). Oh, and facebook’s API doesn’t mean it’s ‘opening up’, that just means people can write apps to engage all these closed networks in new ways. And an EDU address is still pretty good for keeping people out - even moreso that you have to have friends in your account to view most other profiles (FoF permissions), and that limited profiles exist. Perhaps you should try and get an account somewhere…
The idea that people should be forced into public sharing is absurd. The ‘best of the web’ recognize this, and do not uniformly apply ‘i want to be an exhibitionist’ to all sites that involve sharing (agree with Sailor Moon here). Even if the closed nature of the site isn’t perfect, its still a pretty good proxy.
Uh…guys - you originally credited Mashable with this story, but now the link is gone. What happened?