Why YouTube?
By Mat Morrison October 10th, 2006
In Social media
What is it that made YouTube better than Google Video, Vimeo, Revver, Soapbox and the rest? Was it just the size of the audience? Was it easier to use? Was it the social elements? The algorithms?
Please help us decide. All comments, links to articles, corrections etc. will be gratefully received. Bear in mind that (to avoid comment spam) we have to approve your comments if you’ve not posted before - so there’ll be a short delay between a comment being posted and it showing up on the site.
1 Nathan Williams // Oct 10, 2006 at 4:27 pm
Well my immediate reaction would be that Google just “never really grabbed me”, I think it may have something to do with the UI being a bit dull, maybe, a little toooo functional, a little toooo ‘Google’. Hmm will think some more, but that’s my immediate reaction.
Oh also I like the community aspect of YouTube which Google Video doesn’t have, you know, where people post video reply to other videos etc…
2 Asi // Oct 10, 2006 at 4:28 pm
Hola,
Obviously there are multiple reasons, but by the time YouTube started, it was much much easier to use, from any apect of user experience.
There is an old atricle from slate http://slate.com/id/2140635 that skillfully explains that in detail
Very best,
Asi.
3 Handcircus // Oct 10, 2006 at 4:31 pm
A few random reasons…..
1. Lateral browsing
They are *excellent* at cross promoting their content. Google video doesnt have the overlay that pops up at the end to suggest new related videos. Tagging in youtube is vastly superior (google video didnt even have this in the early days). Youtube has buttons all over the place. Lots of the icons look a bit tawdry too, has a nice sleazy voyeuristic webcam feel to it.
2. Popularity is a self-reinforcing property
If all the good content is perceived as being in one place, you end up in a feedback loop where more content ends up being uploaded there as its seen as the definitive video location to put your content. We only need one youtube….. so why use a competitor? Same happened with myspace.
3. Slack copyright reinforcement
Since the first few times I gazed upon youtube, its always had the juicy content (ie copyrighted clips or full length shows). This has really made it the place to go to talk around “events” from the TV over the last 24 hours (Southpark, Jon Stewart etc). If they had been more strict, their success would have been hampered. Uploading dodgy content to google feels naughty somehow due to their immense size. Putting dodgy stuff on a start-up’s server somehow is acceptable. It feels more like a bittorrent site than a massive corporation.
4. Big window
I think the google video window looks shit as its so big it gets stretched. Youtubes is always the right size so the pixels arent 4 inches big. Its a small thing but makes a difference to me.
4 Ben // Oct 11, 2006 at 10:37 am
My vote is the name.
Youtube sounds a whole lot more “fun” and “interesting” the first time you hear it than “Google Video” or “Soap Box”. In the same way that “Google” sounded fun and intriguing the first time you heard it.
5 Nigel Shardlow // Oct 11, 2006 at 11:45 am
I think it’s certainly, in part, a question of usability - although I personally didn’t find it easy to use and find interesting things. Others (teenagers, college students) clearly do find it easy to get to grips with and they are the ones that propagate the hot video links through the internet. Most of the time I’ve spent watching things on Youtube, I’ve just followed one of these links.
Another factor is brand. Youtube is cool, (was) independent, and celebratory of what it’s doing. Google Video is subsumed under the Google behomoth, looks functional, and its purpose is unclear. Given that it sits alongside Google search and Google image search you could be forgiven for thinking that it worked in a similar way, indexing video content from all over the web. But of course, that’s not the way it does work. It’s an upload and share model just like YouTube, and that’s just confusing enough to put people off, I think.
These two factors have pushed YouTube into an audience lead and once you have that you’re pretty much set up on the internet. It dominates the conceptual space for Video (what were those other video sites again?) and will continue to do so. We’ve seen it happen again and again for other domains.
6 Tom Bazeley // Oct 12, 2006 at 5:40 pm
I have used YouTube maybe 50 times. On each occasion I was drawn there by a short clip of film that someone, either by email or just bellowing across the office, had recommended.
These films may have varied dramatically in their provenance, quality, and genre, but I’m pretty sure they were the reason I was there, not the website that happened to be hosting them at the time.
A bit like the myth of Myspace and the Arctic Monkeys. The name/brand of the site is utterly irrelevant to the worth of the thing that you want to watch/listen/play.
7 Geoff Northcott // Oct 12, 2006 at 9:00 pm
I had wondered the same thing and didn’t know the answer myself, so did a bit of looking. I feel a bit cheesy simply parroting off the info or posting these links Google Answers style, but thought you might be interested in checking these out, which do a good job of answering the question:
Also talks about the sheer traffic, which far outstripped any competitor: “100 million video clips a day, and something like 70,000 new videos are added every 24 hours.” This is a critical mass situation, if you know YouTube is where the videos are, that’s where you go look, and that’s where you upload. A lot of this is due to timing, being out early and with the easiest solution.
So comes down to early mover + best platform = best content set and largest audience, which feeds upon itself to scale exponentially beyond competitors.
They then did a good job of then leveraging all the traffic and attention to attract big name talent and dealmakers (such scooping Yahoo’s SVP of finance to become their CFO) to help propel them into legitimacy and to help close the crucial deals with the major media companies, both to offer more content and to make them much less likely to be sued, and thus turn them into a much less risky and more valuable acquisition.
Google ultimately tried and couldn’t succeed as a competitor to them, and instead of trying to play catch up they dipped into their massive and actually potentially problematic cash reserves to buy out a competitor, ensure no one else bought out a competitor, and add a whole new set of eyeballs to their PPC business.
What’s your take?
8 Nigel Shardlow // Oct 17, 2006 at 5:11 pm
The only factor that allows Google to maintain such a high cash reserve in an economy that does, in general, attempt to protect the rights of shareholders must be its huge market cap. The evidence, well established by now, is that companies that hoard cash in this way do so in order to pursue management goals without serious shareholder scrutiny. There’s no telling what they’ll do next, and no stopping them. I hope they buy my company, like, soon.