Click above to watch a SYS-CON Power Panel discussion on Web 2.0, Ajax, and SOA with Dion Hinchcliffe, Jeremy Geelan, and other industry notables including SOA Web Services Journal Editor-in-Chief, Sean Rhody. Taped on Dec 7th, 2005 from the Reuter's TV studio in Times Square.
YouTube has been getting a lot of press lately, both for its runaway success as well as for the real sources of its vast video library. Rated as a top 20 destination on the Web, YouTube serves up at least a whopping 70 million videos a day to its users and also has over 60,000 new videos uploaded every 24 hours. Founded by former Paypalers Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, YouTube is about as classic a Web 2.0 play as you could describe: Not only does it harness the collective intelligence of the Web, a charming if slightly obtuse turn of phrase Tim O'Reilly uses to describe the core of the Web's next generation, YouTube is also a relatively open platform for video sharing. They make it possible for anyone to share YouTube's videos just about anywhere else on the Web.
In fact, to see how well YouTube works, I signed up for an acocunt and had the video below, which I located on YouTube about last year's Web 2.0 Conference (props to Alexander Muse for a pretty darn good production), cross hosted right here in this blog post. It took all of 2 minutes from beginning to end, from signing up and to starting to share. Like TechCrunch's Michael Arrington recently wrote, YouTube makes video sharing really, really simple, and that's a not-to-be-underestimated ingredient in their success.
Example of YouTube Hosted Video:
Excerpts from Last Year's Web 2.0 Conference
Applications as Platforms: Using YouTube to Share Video Anywhere
And you don't have to go searching far to find out that YouTube is #1 site on the Web for sharing online video, with most citations saying that they currently have about 42% of the market, making them bigger than network television in viewership. Also, YouTube has surprisingly low infrastructure costs to deliver all this content, say compared to a cable television company, using only about a million dollars in bandwidth a month according to Forbes. TV production firms would kill for overhead as low, never mind audience that large.
But it's not all paradise in Web 2.0 land. YouTube is struggling to find its stride in generating revenue from the incredible number of viewers it's currently supporting. Hosting banner ads isn't likely to turn the massive amount of online traffic YouTube receives into a significant revenue stream. This is the classic "how do you make money from non-paying Web traffic" issue that many Web 2.0 watchers find troubling from a successful business model point of view. Furthermore, YouTube has potentially serious legal problems and is being sued by the the RIAA and others for copyright infringement. The problem? Though it limits clips to 10 minutes to prevent the sharing of movies and entire TV shows, and removes copyrighted content on request, many have raised the issue that YouTube's success might be largely from non-user generated sources, i.e. commercial copyright content.
Folks like John Battelle believe the popularity of YouTube "proves that our culture wants desparately out of the traditional model of force fed television, and wants to move to a model where we participate in it - indeed, where we remix and share it. But change takes time." Giving users everything and anything what they want is certainly part of the key here. And I think YouTube, like MySpace, is an excellent example that if you balance the various ingredients of an architecture of participation carefully and tune it so that you maximize feedback loops, incredible things can happen in a very short time. In the end, YouTube does demonstrate the forces of disruption that are possible by applying Web 2.0 principles effectively. Now the hard part comes, making it something more than a "clever contraption", as Rob Preston at InformationWeek calls these types of non-financial Web 2.0 success stories.
What do you think? Did YouTube actually bootstrap its traffic on copyrighted content? And when push comes to shove, can it truly thrive on user generated content alone?
I think if YouTube added a bit more MySpace to it, then it could survive on
user generated content alone. MySpace is still clunky and awkward. If
YouTube stepped up the User Interface coding, and added a little more
horizontal functionality, they could do extremely well.
They would need to finally make their forums useful; right now the forums
are a weird appendage to the system that are used mostly by people to pimp
their videos with very little threaded discourse happening. They should
add some regular blogging function to the user page, throw in a little
integrated user to user instant messaging, and they'd be a web superforce.
Another big X factor is if they would be the first to make a safe, fun,
interactive multi-person video chat interface. If they could made a deal
with Skype to handle the conferencing and audio syncing, and then provided
the video delivery and social side of things, they could take the #1 spot
from MySpace in a few months. A hot feature of course would be to allow
people to group watch a vblog together and talk about it, or hoot and
holler at it, all in a live online web party.
YouTube has been getting a lot of press lately, both for its runaway success as well as for the real sources of its vast video library. Rated as a top 20 destination on the Web, YouTube serves up at least a whopping 70 million videos a day to its users and also has over 60,000 new videos uploaded every 24 hours. Founded by former Paypalers Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, YouTube is about as classic a Web 2.0 play as you could describe: Not only does it harness the collective intelligence of the Web, a charming if slightly obtuse turn of phrase Tim O'Reilly uses to describe the core of the Web's next generation, YouTube is also a relatively open platform for video sharing. They make it possible for anyone to share YouTube's videos just about anywhere else on the Web.
Great post in a long line of great posts Dion. I had some rather strong
feelings about this that I articulated in a follow-up blog post http://www.beckshome.com/PermaLink,guid,7df6428b-cfff-4491-a44d-3394a
6922558.aspx
Keep the Web 2.0 intellectual capital flowing.
