There was an interesting post on Silicon Alley Insider today predicting the demise of YouTube. The blog post focuses on the economics and rumors that YouTube is losing several hundred million dollars a year.
I think the author has a point, Google has struggled to turn YouTube into a business. But I think YouTube has reached it’s peak not just because of economic issues (Google can afford some product welfare), but video will naturally fragement leaving YouTube as one of many sources of video. I’m not predicting that YouTube will vanish, but I think YouTube is our generation’s AOL. It is a walled garden, and I strongly doubt that all of mankind’s video will be hosted on a single site for the rest of mankind’s existence.
YouTube’s biggest problem may be its own tremendous success. Video is increasingly becoming a “normal” part of the Internet. We don’t have a single website will all the images in the world. Millions of websites all over the world use images and photos today. In the future, websites of all types and sizes will utilize video. Video consumption will fragment much like text-based web content, online travel, e-commerce, etc., before it. The web is by its very nature decentralized, and YouTube, unlike it’s parent company’s search engine which drives traffic to destinations, is fighting against this very nature. AOL tried this and it failed, although it is still a very large web presence. YouTube won’t go away, but it won’t own the world’s video either.
One Comment
Will YouTube stay the major entry point?
Or will Google Video Search be the new entry point to thousands of hosts?
“We don’t have a single website will all the images in the world”
Yes, that’s obviously true.
But if you want your images to get noticed (as a photographer, for example) you’d better be on Flickr.
Social platforms like YouTube and Flickr offer a lot of advantages.
And, sadly, we don’t know (or care to learn collectively) how to build decentralized social platforms.
(and so, no, Facebook is not the solution ‘against’ YouTube)
“I strongly doubt that all of mankind’s video will be hosted on a single site for the rest of mankind’s existence.”
Who would have thought that just 3 companies (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google) would host hundreds of millions of personal and professional emails?
An enormous share of all emails of mankind, just 3 companies.
It’s totally against the original intent of the emailing system — but it’s a reality.
And anyway, YouTube is not a walled garden in the AOL sense.
YouTube has an open API.
YouTube is accessible from anywhere (save for govs censorship) and anybody can use it.
It’s not what AOL was. At all.
The analogy with AOL is misleading us into believing that history will repeat again.
It will probably not.
Please, understand that I’m all for a non-centralized web. We surely need more web video platforms, with more options and more use-cases.
And Delve Networks is, I’m sure, trying to offer exactly that.
But we must not fool ourselves: centralized content platforms won’t just go away like that.