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September 20, 2006

YouTube headed for Good Morning America

Marshall Kirkpatrick

38 comments »

YouTube announced this morning that the site would host an online “battle of the bands” with user voted winners appearing on Good Morning America and as Cingular ring tones. Good grief, how schmarmy can you get?

On the heels of the far more interesting Warner deal, today’s announcement seems to further validate the belief that monetizing their huge userbase was only a matter of time for the company.

A previous deal with NBC landed the tubers on Jay Leno this weekend, though the financial arrangement was not disclosed in the segment and the grass roots authenticity of the “videos we found on YouTube” was questionable. Next thing you know the Uncle Sam will put “this is your brain on drugs” clips on YouTube - wait, that already happened.

Can YouTube keep its edge once it’s become the new home for stylistically antiquated music promotions tied in with mainstream TV and cell phone ring tones? The YouTube user community didn’t seem to respond well to Paris Hilton. As YouTube is gentrified, where will the next hip, low rent neighborhood for viral video emerge? There doesn’t seem to be any particularly compelling competitors, though last night’s Yahoo! partnership with Current.tv could be interesting and Revver is probably trying the hardest so far among the startups.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 at 9:41 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. NeoTechie

    September 20th, 2006 at 9:54 am

    Everyone wants to become successful in Web 2.0. A word to YouTube, as you get bigger and better don’t forget the users are the ones that got you there. Yes, you are a pioneer in the web tube area, but you will have a lot of completion so keep on innovating.

    Keep us interested.

  2. nalts

    September 20th, 2006 at 10:30 am

    Nice piece. I like Techcrunch’s perspective on online video.

    As YouTube goes mainstream, the amateur market will quickly move to another site to enjoy the consumer-generated clips with a sense of community. YouTube is drifting from its core here, and that’s a curse of being #1. This will help commercialize the site, which I respect. But grassroot consumers are going to eventually look for a vehicle in which they aren’t pitted against Big, Old Media. Where will they go? Hmmm… how about somewhere that shares ad revenue?

  3. Chris D

    September 20th, 2006 at 10:39 am

    “…monetizing their huge userbase…”

    How do you know the terms of the ABC/NBC deal? I don’t think we can simply assume that YouTube is being paid much for this, or paid at all.

    Perhaps it’s the networks providing the value here. A couple of press releases/quotes and a “non-agreesion pact” from the Big Networks is very, very valuable for YouTube right now. Remember, NBC was very peeved about the LazySunday bit and thus it is conceivable that NBC got its partnership experiment completely free.

    Only once YouTube has fully completed these promotional agreements, they can be evaluated whether there is actual value here for the Networks. If there’s no value creation, then Networks will loose interest.

    However, it will be all very interesting to see how it unfolds over the next 6 months or so. It seems like YouTube is indeed swinging for the fenses, so it will be the trend setter to watch.

  4. Patricia

    September 20th, 2006 at 10:50 am

    ^ How soon will we see the results of You Tube’s promotional agreements, then?

    Does anybody know what YouTube’s strategy is overall? What they’ve been saying they’ll do next? I should google this before I say what I think about it :)

  5. Damian

    September 20th, 2006 at 1:24 pm

    YouTube just did the kiss of death - admitting that they need to patrol their site for copywritten content. Given that this material is probably the reason why people go there - sure people check out the weird little videos, but let’s face it - it’s where you go when you want to find that SNL clip - I can imagine that their traffic is going to go down - we’ll see. This is the same path that the original Napster followed to a T.

  6. Paul Drago

    September 20th, 2006 at 1:44 pm

    “The YouTube user community didn’t seem to respond well to Paris Hilton. As YouTube is gentrified, where will the next hip, low rent neighborhood for viral video emerge?” — Great Quote

  7. Andy

    September 20th, 2006 at 2:02 pm

    This is really interesting to see where the on-line video hosts will go as far as generating capital. The big three (ABC, NBC, CBS) are terrified of an on-line community that gets their information and entertainment on-line. Personally, I would pay a fee to use youtube’s storage/venue for my vids. I hope to see them lay off the networks and start a pro version like flickr has and make their income that way. I’m sure most people would want the exposure on the big three when it comes to their project. I just hope we can find a way to keep it more web based.

  8. Amit Chowdhry

    September 20th, 2006 at 2:03 pm

    Wrote an article on my website about YouTube’s 3 headlining stories. I hope you have as much fun reading it as much as I had fun writing it:

    http://pulse2.com

    Also tried to trackback TechCrunch, but for some reason the feed didn’t ping correctly.

  9. Tault

    September 20th, 2006 at 2:18 pm

    Ugh good morning america is painfull. It seems like youtube popped out of nowhere in 2 months. Im suprised the google video beta didnt take off like youtube did it always seems odd to me.

  10. Amit Chowdhry

    September 20th, 2006 at 2:33 pm

    ^Tault I’d say that main reason why YouTube took off faster than Google Video was because Google Video makes you wait days for your video to go public after uploading whereas YouTube just takes a few minutes. I believe Google Video has a huge limit (if there is one) to the number of minutes that your footage contains of your video so that there is a filtering process that takes place for this whereas YouTube only allows a maximum of a 20 minutes for each video to be uploaded. YouTube’s 20 minute limit and Google’s filtering process are a couple of ways to deter users from uploading full episodes of TV shows or full movies illegally. Clearly, users want to see their videos online and public right after its done uploading.

  11. Stephen Sclafani

    September 20th, 2006 at 2:38 pm

    Tault,

    Google Video didn’t take off because straight video hosting is boring. Not until last month did Google add any of the social features that made YouTube popular.

  12. TechcrunchReader

    September 20th, 2006 at 2:41 pm

    I’m starting to get a bit annoyed with all these YouTube, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, etc. posts. Don’t get me wrong: They’re well-written and usually very fascinating, but I’d rather just see something new. Anything new.

  13. Patricia

    September 20th, 2006 at 3:37 pm

    I like that there’s reporting on what’s cooking with video - the social networks are the ones making the moves right now, but I think that it’s good to keep watch because what happens next is going to be important and isn’t going to include the usual suspects you mentioned. I hope to keep hearing perspective.

    I’m bored with hearing about social networks overall though and I own one! We can thank Murdoch for that - he obviously knows being noisy is the key but ay yay yay already. I want what’s next, too.

  14. mesattack

    September 20th, 2006 at 4:22 pm

    I wrote a post on this topic recently. The deal is when you begin to abuse the users with things they may or may not want they will eventually be desensitized to the entire mess of ads, promotions, et al. This happened on Facebook, I predict it will happen on MS, and what is needed is a revolutionary jump connecting what I really want to my service needs like video, music, etc.

    Mark
    http://www.markseremet.com

  15. Sarah

    September 20th, 2006 at 5:31 pm

    It might be a lot easier for a fresh company to usurp YouTube’s market than Facebook’s, though; Facebook users are tied to the site by networks that they have spent years creating, while YouTube doesn’t encompass that kind of social bond.

    Sarah
    http://www.LifeAtHarvard.com

  16. alan

    September 20th, 2006 at 6:01 pm

    Video Webcasters are here to stay, this is just the beginning - YouTube is the video equivalent of Napster 1.0…and clearly they are aware of what happened there.

    What I use YouTube for is not the usual commercially available stuff, or the home made video. There is a raft of stuff on there like videos of old bands of the 70’s. Sure this stuff is copyrighted but the holders aren’t publishing anything I can buy - but I can watch it on YouTube.

    Seems to me that in a Long Tail, Web Video World a “use it or lose it” sort of approach to rights may emerge, as there is no excuse to not make it commercially available if it exists - production and margketing csost are hardly an issue on the Web.

  17. cg

    September 20th, 2006 at 6:06 pm

    if that sports betting picks site was any good, they’d ask their users to predict the date that YouTube officially runs out of money. Now THAT would be worth betting on.

  18. newyork-girl

    September 20th, 2006 at 7:25 pm

    Can’t blame them for trying to make money. At the end of the day people will watch what they want. I think their bandwidth costs are around $1Million/month. At this rate, if they DON’T come thru with these large deals, they will not be around for very long.

  19. Dave McClure

    September 20th, 2006 at 7:49 pm

    that approach sounds a lot like the contests that Bix.com is running… altho i’d say Bix has built a general platform for contests that YouTube hasn’t (yet anyway).

    will be interesting to see whether the contest tools are unique IP or not.

    (full disclosure: i’m an advisor for Bix)

  20. TJ

    September 20th, 2006 at 9:42 pm

    I totally agree with newyork-girl not to mention Microsofts new entry into the market. I tend to fall along with the tired of social network crew but what else is there to talk about?

  21. chuya

    September 21st, 2006 at 4:58 am

    @ Amit Chowdhry
    “YouTube’s 20 minute limit and Google’s filtering process are a couple of ways to deter users from uploading full episodes of TV shows or full movies illegally.”

    I thought YouTube now had a 10 minute limit for all users except for those with Director accounts? (The latter can upload videos of any length.)

    http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=4KWKYZN7znU

  22. Amit Chowdhry

    October 3rd, 2006 at 1:36 am

    Hmm, they may have cut it down to 10 minutes. I haven’t tried uploading anything that long yet, but I have seen movies chopped up that are over 10 minutes long without being Director status

  23. cool

    March 5th, 2007 at 6:49 am

    cry

  24. cool

    March 5th, 2007 at 6:51 am

    suk it

  25. cool

    March 5th, 2007 at 6:52 am

    fuck you all

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