Video goes viral

Video on the net is nothing new. But with the arrival of YouTube and other video sharing sites, it's suddenly become a phenomenon. Video is finally easy to upload, easy to find, easy to share. So far it's free, and anyone can view it - regardless of operating system or web browsers. And it comes in quick-loading, bite-sized chunks.
Thursday, June 29 - 2006So what are these videos? Uploaded by users, the variety is infinite: from music videos, travel, sports, comedy, film clips, cult TV titles, science experiments and cute animals to random people sitting in front of a webcam giving their opinion on random topics. Adult content is usually banned, to keep sites off web-nanny blacklists. The brilliance of YouTube and its associates - Revver, MetaCafe, Yahoo Video and Google Video to name just a few - is that they allow people to embed their videos on other sites. A blogger, for example, can cut and paste a couple of lines of code and display their favourite music videos from YouTube on their blog. It greatly maximises the exposure for the videos and of course the video sharing sites. Popular videos go viral, with tens or hundreds of thousands of users viewing them, commenting on them, and re-linking to them.
Stunning figuresThe figures are spectacular. YouTube currently has a 63% market share, with 12.5 million visitors a month watching more than seventy million videos a day. There are around forty million different videos on YouTube, with sixty thousand new videos uploaded every day. It has become one of the Top 50 most visited websites. USA Today described it as the "beginning of the age of personal media". What inspired YouTube's founders was the difficulty of putting digital video on the web. With the explosion in camcorders and video-enabled digital cameras, people have millions of hours of footage but no easy to way to share it. It's too big to email. It's too difficult (and often too expensive) to put it on a personal website. Video sharing sites do all the work and bear all the cost.
The money modelBut this bandwidth is expensive. It's estimated that bandwidth costs YouTube US$1 million per month. But the investment - YouTube has raised US$11 million in venture capital - is money more than well-spent. YouTube estimates that it could already earn US$10 million a month by putting ads at the start of every video. So far, it hasn't, because it doesn't want to alienate viewers. Instead it's looking for new and creative ways to get advertisers on board. One of these is US TV network NBC, which has just signed a cross-promotional agreement with YouTube. This is despite a rockier early relationship, when NBC ordered YouTube to remove unlicensed copyright clips of Saturday Night Live. But NBC realised that the illegal video had actually created unprecedented hype for SNL. So it's now agreed to run TV and online ads for YouTube, in return for YouTube running legal promotional clips of NBC's autumn line-up.
A niche opportunityFor advertisers, the beauty of video sharing sites is being able to target highly niche audiences. All videos are tagged with different keywords, from the general "music" "sport" "comedy" to specifics such as "Britney" "golf" "kittens". Nearly a third of YouTube's visitors are aged 18-24, a key youth market that is getting harder for marketers to reach. YouTube's founders claim they don't want to replace TV or Hollywood, but act as a complementary service. But the boundaries are blurred. Videos on YouTube have a 10-minute length limit, but many users have split up entire TV programmes and feature films into numbered segments. Thousands of music videos are recorded off the TV and put up on YouTube, making it like a personalised MTV jukebox. It's also a showcase for users to promote themselves. Out-of-work actors and wannabes are known to have used YouTube to plug their talents. Some have picked up work. Other YouTube users have become cult names and been signed professionally. TUNG, a tongue-cleaning product manufacturer, are sponsoring one rising YouTube star because of his "huge obsession with licking things".
Lessons to be learntThere's a lot to learn from YouTube. The first lesson is that internet users are desperate for compelling, quirky and entertaining multimedia content. And they are happy to get it in small bites. They may not want to pay for it, but they'll probably put up with a short TVC or banner ad for the privilege of watching. The second is universality. Anyone, anywhere, on any system - even mobile devices - can watch YouTube's videos. There are no proprietary formats, no plug-ins to download, you don't need a particular browser or the latest version of Windows. This is going to be a harsh lesson for video sites that try to force users to specific (usually Windows-only) formats. Accessibility is the only way. The third - as NBC has learnt, but the RIAA still shuts its eyes to - is not to fear and resist the New Media Revolution, but to embrace it. The internet is here to stay and here to grow. It's impossible to try and control the machinations of millions of hungry bright minds. If people want to see a video, they'll find a way to rip it, copy it, encode it. Forget proprietary formats, forget copyright protection - the hackers and crackers will always be ten steps ahead.