It may not have achieved the 17.8 million views that Chris Crocker’s classic “Leave Britney Alone” video has — or even the 7 million views that the startled prairie dog known as “Dramatic Chipmunk” has gotten — but then, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s speech on racism has only been up on YouTube for less than 24 hours (as of mid-day Wednesday), and it already has over 1.2 million views.
That’s not bad. Another month or so and maybe it could get into the same territory as “The Evolution of Dance,” which has a mind-boggling 78 million views. Of course, Obama’s speech has an actual message that is somewhat deeper than the average YouTube video — hard to tell whether that will help or hinder its advance up the charts.
Since its public launch a couple of weeks ago, a new video-oriented website and community called BigThink has been called snobbish and “a YouTube for smarty-pants.” But Montreal-born Victoria Brown, who co-founded the site with her partner Peter Hopkins, told me in a recent interview that the site isn’t intended to be elitist or preachy, and stressed that anyone is free to contribute their thoughts on just about any topic, including Britney Spears.
That said, however, it’s clear that BigThink is trying to take the high road when it comes to content. Anyone who has grown even a little weary of the funny cat videos on YouTube or the coked-out Amy Winehouse videos on gossip sites such as PerezHilton may find it a refreshing change. Brown and Hopkins have seeded the site with video interviews featuring people like such as Moby, psychologist Steven Pinker, activist Aayan Hirsi Ali and Buddhist scholar (and Uma’s dad) Robert Thurman.
The BigThink site is divided into two large content groups: Meta and Physical. The videos — of which the site has more than 180 now — are done in the style popularized by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, with the subject looking straight at the camera, as though talking to the viewer. Most of the interviews are an hour long (although Ms. Brown says the site will be doing shorter, more news-focused interviews as well), but they are segmented by question and by topic, to make it easy for viewers browsing BigThink to find videos they might want to watch.
Kevin Nalts is a marketer who currently works for a Fortune 100 company as a consumer-product director, and moonlights as a YouTube comedian, one whose channel is in the top 10 in the comedy section, with more than 24,000 subscribers and over 1.2 million channel views. He also writes a blog called Will Video For Food.
Nalts wrote a column recently for Advertising Age in which he gave marketers some tips on using video and YouTube — a nice counterpoint to the recent piece by a “viral” marketer who wrote a post over at TechCrunch about how to manipulate your way to the front page of YouTube.
So Hulu, the joint venture between NBC and News Corp. that some thought would be a YouTube competitor, has sort of launched — or at least it has given some of the chosen few in Silicon Valley a look at the service. As far as I can tell from most descriptions of it, it sounds like a video-distribution network that will compete more with Brightcove and other similar video services than it will with YouTube.
In other words, it has nothing to do with “user-generated content” or people uploading video — it’s all about network content from NBC and News Corp., distributed through a Flash player that can be embedded on other sites and will be white-labeled to partners such as AOL and MySpace. Still, the early impressions seem positive; even Kara Swisher seems to like it, and so does MG Siegler at ParisLemon.
To the extent that NBC and News Corp. are getting the idea that distributing your content by any means available is a good thing, I think Hulu is a positive step. But as Mark Hendrickson points out at TechCrunch, this is still very much a TV-centric model — that is, shows and content appear and disappear based on the TV schedule. It may be flashy and well-designed, but I wonder whether it will be compelling enough to really draw people in.
Further reading:
Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider has a nice rundown of the things that make Hulu less thrilling than it appears, and one of those things is the restrictions on the content that Hulu distributes. And Liz Gannes has more on that angle as well — as she puts it:
“Hulu can’t avoid the trappings of big media. The company is tied up in a contradictory situation, where it’s chartered to have web-wide distribution while trying to maintain tight control over the user experience wherever it goes.”
PaidContent has a nice overview of the launch as well, including the $100-million investment by Providence Partners.
I have to be honest: I’m not sure whether Viacom’s new plan for The Daily Show is a great idea or a really dumb idea (I’m also leaving open the possibility that it’s somewhere in between those two). The network — which has been feuding with YouTube for almost a year now over various clips of John Stewart that keep popping up on the site — is launching a site dedicated to the show, which will offer more than 13,000 clips dating back to the very beginning.
According to this story in the LA Times, Viacom has spent a lot of time tagging and identifying clips so that they can be searched and aggregated by topic, guests, etc. –and even plans to allow users to take part in the cataloguing to some extent, Wikipedia-style. In the piece, the head of digital media at Comedy Central thanks YouTube for jolting Viacom executives into awareness:
“Without YouTube, he said, Viacom might not have recognized the true value of the archives and dragged its feet in digitally archiving and tagging” the clips.”
Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget thinks Viacom’s move is dumb. He thinks the network should quit suing YouTube (which it says it is still going ahead with) and upload all of its clips to the site. Part of me thinks that he’s right — why not make use of the service that everyone already associates with The Daily Show anyway? Plus it comes with built-in Flash encoding, easy embedding, commenting tools, etc.
At the same time, however, YouTube has constraints. Clips tend to be short and poor quality, for example — and to a large extent that’s what users have come to expect. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to do the kind of tagging and other things that Viacom is talking about, and even if they could be done they might be wasted on an audience that just wants to watch a funny clip.
I think (as my friend Steve Bryant at the Hollywood Reporter does) that in an ideal world Viacom would do both: upload short clips to YouTube and let people embed them wherever they want, and then have a much larger storehouse of longer clips and entire shows — all tagged and catalogued, with added features and possibly even HD content — at its own site.
I'm a technology writer with The Globe and Mail in Toronto, and this is where I blog about the collision between media and the Web. I also have a Globe blog, which is here. Send me email at mathew (at) mathewingram.com, or for more info, click the picture.
