Mr. Know-It-All #5 – Market Threats to Youtube

Thanks to my success with Twittercize, I was asked to guest lecture for a graduate Internet Marketing Communication class at the University of Denver. For one week, the online students obliged my rambling, opinionated self. This series of blog posts excerpts some of my answers. Special thanks to a real marketing whiz, Lora Louise Broady, for asking me to participate. You know I loves the spotlight.

Historically, brand strength has been associated with who came first. A quick test: What’s the top college in the United States. Most folks say Harvard. Why? It was the first.

I don’t know if that holds true in the 21st century, especially when related to online media. Netscape gave way to Mozilla Firefox, Excite and Lycos gave way to Yahoo! and Google, and MySpace is losing ground against Facebook.

Youtube came “first” (sort of) but is also different than the aforementioned for one reason: part of its brand strength comes from the volume of its video holdings. Can Youtube fall behind? Absolutely. But they’ve got one impressive head start. Google and Yahoo! video, along with at least a dozen other sites (Vimeo, Viddle, etc.) combined still don’t have even a fraction of Youtube’s collection.

Still, as handheld video technology and video editing software becomes cheaper and easier for inexperienced users, we’re going to see the production value from little Jimmy’s birthday party dramatically increase. When that happens, Youtube’s video length limitations may become an Achilles’ Heel.

Furthermore, they need to address their lack of copyrighted content soon, because folks aren’t watching feature films and television (10 minutes at a time) on Youtube anymore–they’re going to Hulu instead. Every time that happens, Youtube loses a critical clickthrough opportunity. And when television goes entirely online (and it will, complete with every episode of every television show ever created) folks may lose interest in watching bootlegs and home videos anyway.