On the Facebook...
I had an interesting comment on the last episode of the podcast from my friend Terry Pham on Facebook:
I’m with you on the YouTube and getting totally unrelated “related” videos. I’ve been making an effort to find other video sites like Vimeo (I like viddler and dailymotion) but a lot of the stuff I look for is mostly on YouTube. I think higher quality video sites like Hulu and TV.com will take some users away from YouTube but they’ll still remain king for awhile. This scenario reminds me back in the day when Yahoo Auctions was trying to compete with eBay but in the end eBay’s user base was just too much and really I don’t think Yahoo really tried/cared anyway. Competition is good but it sure is harder to compete on the internets.
My thought about that is this:
YouTube really will never go away because it’s the Wal-Mart of user generated video. Where else can you get music videos, family vacations, and dudes lighting farts right next to each other?
The thing about Vimeo is that I don’t really see it as a YouTube competitor so much because it really does serve a different community. The Vimeo community seems to have more sophisticated taste and are making their content with more sophisticated skills and equipment.
And, Hulu is an even different animal from all the other examples you’ve mentioned. Hulu is kind of the epitome of video sites because it aggregates the highest quality video from the TV networks. To me it doesn’t even begin to compete with YouTube. Crappy copies of DVR-ripped shows don’t stand up to HD streams of the same content.
There’s always a place for YouTube. The problem is that it’s enormous content bloat makes the finding of content (either through recommendations or related links) a little cumbersome and in cases such as the zit popping fiasco completely ineffective.
And if you’re wondering, yes… I watched about 3 zit videos before turning away. It was like this awful train wreck. Each one was more disgusting than the last but I just couldn’t turn away. I spared you all great mental scarring by only showing you the tiniest bit of the video I showed in the last episode. Blech.