YouTube: the leading Video Portal

There are boring corporate fact sheets … and there are really exiting ones: YouTube’s story is amazing and close to unbelievable, regarding its official start in December 2005 after being founded in February 2005 “from a garage in Menlo Park”. If you didn’t hear about YouTube yet, here’s their self-conception: “YouTube is a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience.”

YouTube

The service is set up for videobloggers, comedians, professional content producers, filmmakers, musicians, and anyone else making videos. But back to their fact sheet [August 2006]:

• 6 million unique users at YouTube.com
• are watching more than 1oo million videos,
• more than 2oo million webpages, and there are
• more than 65,ooo videos being uploaded daily.
• YouTube.com is ranked the 18th most trafficked site on the Internet.
• The user base age is 18 to 49, spanning all geographies.
• YouTube implemented a 10minute limit for video uploads in March 2006 to prohibit unauthorized videos from being uploaded to the site.
• YouTube is pursuing advertising as its business model.

Impressed? I am!

Especially when it comes to the Web-2.0-discussion you’ll face nearly everywhere when someone talks about YouTube’s success. And although it’s true that its users or ‘community’ drives YouTube, I call YouTube a portal, as it’s a centralized service and would have been a typical example for 1990’s major portal services. That’s not a valuation but a conclusion.

Who should care?

About YouTube and video sharing at all? First there are video makers and distributors who should have learned through YouTube that the web is ready for videos. Second there are all marketers and brand managers who like to achieve the attention and awareness of more than 6 million unique users a day willing to watch videos online [one about your brands probably?]. Third there are the major search engines that lost another key market.

Search engines?

Well. If you’re looking for pictures today [maybe a new product] you’re using flickr [not Google; that’s why Yahoo bought them]. If you’re looking for peoples voice through weblogs and weblog entries you’re using Technorati [not Google, Yahoo or MSN]. And if you’re looking for videos you’re using YouTube [again: not one of the majors].

All these centralized content portals and communities became the leading search engines in their fields: In my opinion a big impact to the major search engines as the web becomes a more multimedia environment from day to day. Text is one thing, weblogs another and pictures or videos are totally different. Maybe Google etc. should refocus on their core exercises [searching the web - that’s pictures and videos as well] instead of differentiating to new fields every day? We’ll see what happens right here on the web in near future.