As Variety is reporting, NBC is gearing up to launch it’s first (well, second) “major assault” against YouTube, Didja.com (currently a parked page).
The site will “celebrate advertising as entertainment” and feature “a free online archive of current and classic television commercials, movie trailers and other brand-related content”. The name, Didja, is short for “did you see that”, the apparent reaction they’re hoping to get from viewers. The site will be cross promoted on NBC’s television channel and will eventually on all divisions of NBC Universal. It’s set to launch the beginning of next year, sometime after the still-unnamed joint venture with News Corp., dubbed “Clown Co.” by Google execs.
The site is all about advertising and NBC getting paid for it. NBC hopes advertisers will pay for prominent placement on the site or to create their own branded pages (e.g. an all-McDonald’s channel). The customizable branded pages will allow advertisers to upload commercials to the site, include product offers, store locators, and other tools.
For viewers, the site will feature an extensive social networking component as well as a mash-up tools to remix their own “advertainment”.
This territory has been heavily treaded before. TBS has their own Veryfunnyads website, featuring *gasp* “Very funny advertisements”. Clipland is a smaller site that’s been doing the same thing. Not least of all is YouTube itself, which attracts the lions share of ads and trailers people actually want to watch.
more like “didja see how bad we f’d this up the first time? we hope not”
No, more like… the failure of this site brought to you by…
I love that logo.
This thing is D.O.A.
Clown Co is actually a better name, whouldathunkit?
No one, no matter how much promo they give the thing, is going to go to a site _just_ to be marketed to. I will watch cool ads on YouTube because that’s just a tiny slice of the content they’ve got.
LAME.
Reminds me of AdCritic from the Web 1.0 days.
Maybe there is a market for SuperBowl Ads and some classic ads.
I think there is a place for “advertainment”, but worked around other video content.
I guess NBC thinks quite little of its viewers… I got nothing to do when not watching NBC, I want to go online and look at all those wonderful adds over and over again in case I missed some when I got my new TIVO ?
There are some great ads out there, but I doubt NBC will siphen then down - I also bet there will be “regular, boring ads” before watching the “interesting ads” as well.
Jon
If its focused on giving the best placement to those with the biggest pocketbooks - its gonna have some problems.
Wait, why would I go to this site?
Its like having a commercial channel on television. Can anyone think of a worse idea?
@Jay,
Yeah…. NBCi.
How many times do you need to remind us “the Google execs dubbed it ClownCo.! get it? har har!”…..
Yes, we get it that Google thinks it will fail, the joke was lame 6 months ago.
The especially humorous thing to me is, Google couldn’t even come up with something that was better than youtube, so they just bought it. If NBC joint venture is actually sustainable, it’ll do better than Google Video ever did.
now we have more options to post opinions through video!!
NBC already has it’s own ‘Partner’ channel on Youtube, see: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=NBC
It appears to be within the top 20 most subscribed, so I guess they’re thinking if they can acheive this already on YT, why not create themselves.
If they heavily cross promote across all their media channels…and make the core focus on on-demand access to their shows etc (eg Channel 4 on demand in the UK) and then build the sponsored ad channels around this, they they might have a hope.
Laughed at loud, really. “Didja”? Is this a hoax? Seriously. “Didja?” - this comedy writes itself…
Didja notice we are a bunch of old school “used car salesman” types, oblivious to modern technology and the concept of “people power”?
Didja notice that we only have our college football mentality to draw upon when formulating a plan to compete against the Phd’s at Google?
Didja notice we think people that are YouTube users are stupid?
…too easy, I gotta stop.
Geez….enough consumer-generated content and ads, the truth is, most of these commercials people just won’t wish to watch. NBC will need to create loyalty before the followers of funny content will watch their commercials chosen… I don’t see Clown Company becoming the next YouTube, and yet we have another YouTube clone…Hey, more places for us to host our content and drive traffic to our videos, I wonder what the size restrictions will be…