So, rather than being suspicious of YouTube as a whole, I am suspicious of the Top 10 lists. How are they created? Who populates them?

You may not need to pay to post a video on YouTube, but I would not be surprised to see payment required for a Top 10 list placement.

You’re absolutely right about Google and innovation. But to your point I would add: “So?” Microsoft has made a hell of a business out of Other People’s Ideas. Henry Ford didn’t invent the car. Ray Kroc paid the McDonald’s brothers for their restaurant idea. And Steve Jobs brought his MP3 player to market way after plenty of competitors.

This is similar to the arguments when Google started: “How are they going to monetize search?” And they found the money there. There’s money in YouTube and if anyone can milk it, it’s Google.

I really admire Mark Cuban for his willingness to put controversial ideas out there for debate. Agree or disagree with The Maverick, ya gotta love what he brings to the game.

Adwords/Adsense were licensed from Overture; Scholar and Book already had people in the space; They do webmail and they acquired an old newsgroup interface and archive, then they slapped derivative front-ends onto the things; Now, they’re doing Paypal and they’ve tried to follow iTunes into selling video clips. I find it extremely doubtful that they’ll find a completely new money trail all on their own and any way you look at it, banner ads (page wraps) wouldn’t qualify.

Right now, Google and YouTube are trendy, as is hate for some of the older outlets. In my opinion, they both have some good services, but one’s a search engine that tries to pretend it’s not a portal and if you took out all of the copyright violations and misleading clips, the shelves of the other would be pretty bare.

but, if they’re serving up a “few hundred million streams a month” then there’s your audience waiting for a business model.

terrible problem to have, right?

and i remain convinced that the bandwidth argument is smoke…if no one used the site the bandwidth cost would be zero.

Yes, bandwidth is cheaper. But it’s not so cheap that it isn’t an issue when you’re delivering a few hundred million streams a month.

i respect mr. c for taking the $ and running back when, but he is way off on this point.

the cost of bandwidth has come down substantially. and it will continue to decline.

find a new angle.

and yes, “the networks should spend less time focusing on you tube”. look how newspapers failed to address a text-based internet and how that applies to a video-based on in which bandwidth costs are no longer the issue they once were.

happy new year to everyone!!!

There are a number of commercial and sponsorship opportunities, but it’s not at all a slam dunk. While it’s easy to monitize that SNL clips, figuring out a way to make money off of someone’s fake porn is a harder challenge.

Which brings me to a tangental point. I think the networks should spend less time focusing on YouTube and more time making those same clips available to as many sites as possible. Rather than CBS uploading Letterman clips to YouTube, they would be a lot better off creating a Letterman video widget (with ads as either a preroll or embedded in the player) that sites could add at their discretion. Plus, make the clips available separately to as many sites as possible, to offset the bandwidth charges for CBS.

You would think that the networks would have learned from their iTune experience, and work on organically growing the long tail audience, rather than letting a third party aggregate it for them.

Here’s what YouTube and other video sites do that TV does not:

1. Searchable
2. On-Demand
3. It doesn’t have to be 30 to 60-minutes
4. It operates 24/7. TV goes on hiatus all the time — repeats, repeats, repeats.

I disagree with your notion of what a commercial is, at least from the user perspective. I’ve maintained that “advertising is news if it’s information people want.” The truth is that we like advertising - if it’s for a product we’re considering. If I’m in the market for a computer and a contextual advertisement informs me that the computer I want is now 1/2 off, that’s a big news story for *me.* Saving my family $500 is *news.*

So if NBC plays nice and lets me watch and share their latest Digital Short - yes, it is a promotion for SNL. It’s also fun. We’re always going to have commercials. What we in the industry need to do is provide commercials that engage users. People don’t hate ads (they love some of them), they hate noise.

And you’re absolutely right - underestimating Google’s ability to monetize is becoming a national pasttime.

Go Celtics!

Also there’s the whole story about Google buying all the dark fiber. So though I think someday their stock price will quit being such a prop for the company, they may actually have a plan and we’re just not yet privvy to the information.

The potential for monetizing the interface could possibly come from using Adwords in a sidebar, midstream rolls for longer clips and advertising charges for the “commercials”. At least those are the things that I’d consider, but as for the embedded video, it’d probably have to be financed with a pre-roll.

And, as for all of the junk listed from their mainpage, I really wish they would find a way to eliminate the chaff. Over the years, I’ve gotten in the habit of occasionally perusing iFilm’s “Top” lists and for a time, I subscribed to some of their RSS feeds, but they eventually proved overwhelming.

I’ve tried on occasion to do something similar with the YouTube lists, but far too much of it was misleading. I realize that the unpoliced nature of YouTube is part of its viral popularity and I do use the site, but from the standpoint of the user knowing what they’re going to get, iFilm is at a distinct advantage. Plus, they’ve been using pre-roll for years and though they were a bit slow with the ability to embed and that may have had some effect, but their actual traffic stats don’t appear to have suffered because of the ads.

I define the clips as commercials because they were uploaded by the corporation that owns the content. A promotion, a commercial… if you see a clip of richard simmons on David Letterman in a CBS show .. Its a commercial. if you see it on YT, its still a commercial