They favor quality video over schlok.

This isn’t bad news for amateurs - by definition they are not trying to monetize their clips - it is bad news for organizations that thought they could climb on to the video gravytrain without any investment in training or equipment.

but drink and canoe and you’ll get hailed!!!

check out molokaitimes(dot)com and themolokaidispatch(dot)com ’s “mastah blastah” storyand pix for a good laugh over the holiday weekend.

have a great t’giving!

thanks for the link to the exception that proves the tdc rule.

What do you do when the deer have guns?

“Get into the ammunition business.”

This is YouTube, and those who misinterpret or misuse its purpose in validating their own illusions are deceived. Of course people like professional content. This is no bulletin.

But to all who produce professional content, whose would YOU rather view and share, yours or somebody else’s?

Maybe YouTube can find a business model which profits from these clips, but they obviously haven’t done it yet and as Cory said in the first comment to this thread, there isn’t a lot of room for other companies in the tent. This is not to say that a news website wouldn’t be served by asking viewers to upload their own “reports”, but they would obviously have to be vetted, with semi-professional production values and the market for this content would mostly be very local in nature.

The reason the big media companies were beaten so bad by it is because they’re so reluctant to let the user have what they want.

And that’s a wrong definition. The Long Tail is precisely what you want it to be, that’s why it’s the long tail.

If it were some discretely identifiable content, it wouldn’t be Long Tail. The reason it’s long tail is because a small audience will watch it - like friends of said teenagers and strangers (although they wouldn’t be strangers to them).

For you, the long tail could be music or TV shows you were into back in the day, that never get repeated on TV, but find a new life and distribution channel on the internet. Or DVD. Eventually these two channels will be the same anyway.

What I’m not watching are teenagers dancing around their bedrooms, or some strangers birthday party and that’s my definition of the illusionary “long-tail”.

I took the position that I rarely watch any non-professional video on YouTube or elsewhere and I have to say that in the months since that discussion, the number of amateur videos that I watch has further decreased.

Of course, I do count Ze Frank, LonelyGirl and a few others as being among the new professionals, but if you exclude these new media creations and that which originates from old media, I don’t know when the last time was that I watched anything purely amateur and completely unscripted online.

(My kid watches “America’s Funniest Home Videos”, so I’ve probably seen more minutes of it over the past year, than I’ve watched anything I’ve like it online)

Again, the point that many people miss is that YouTube is an empowering technology: not a media showcase of user-gen content. The predominate reason people upload video is not in a hope it hits the home page or goes viral, but the technology allows them to share it with their friends. Easy upload, invisible transcoding, free hosting and easy sharing. YouTube was (and is) a technology solution for user-gen content.

Other sites that tried to duplicate that are having mixed success because 1) theyre a little late to that game and 2) YouTube is very easy to use.

Theres also a big business for professional amateur video — its just different. Both will succeed with different models and in different combinations. Media people like to think the amateur hour is ending, but its just beginning.