User Generated Content, the succes that is YouTube.
February 2005, two random guys thought it would be a nice idea to create an online community where whoever felt like it could upload and view video content.
By October 2006 Google paid $1.65 billion dollars for the company. Hurray! Success!YouTube works in a relatively simple way: register and you can upload as many video’s as you want, stay unregistered and you can pretty much watch all the video’s you want, except the ones who have been ‘flagged’ by the YouTube community, which means they contain content that some people may find shocking or offensive. These video’s can only be viewed by people over 18. Also, if the content of the video in question is against the YouTube rules, it will be removed.The founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim where all early employees of PayPal. They started YouTube in a garage, with just a few computers and Internet access. That was all it took.
By 2005, YouTube was founded one of the fastest growing websites and was rated 5th most popular website on Alexa, something even fast-growing MySpace couldn’t keep up with.One thing that YouTube unfortunatly had to deal with we’re copyright-lawsuits. Even though it’s official policy is to not show copyrighted content, ofcourse users all over the world uploaded videomaterial that did in fact had copyright on it, by example, the popular Saturday Night Live short Lazy Sunday and clips of the 2006 Olympics. NBC Universal took action against this by asking for the removal of some of its copyrighted content.
YouTube agreed with NBC and solved the problem by removing video’s, making agreements with three different media companies and by setting a new rule for uploaded video’s: none could be longer than ten minutes each.
Whether the latter is effective is rather questionable, users simply cut their video’s into pieces just under 10 minutes.Obviously, a succesful site like YouTube cannot stay unnoticed for long. The buzz around it consisted mostly of online word-of-mouth, but the incident involving NBC made the news. Soon, NBC realized the great possibilties of a videocommunity as YouTube and made an advertising deal. Now YouTube promotes NBC video’s.
CBS quickly followed NBC’s example.Several other sites have been released in order to compete with YouTube, such as Google Video and Yahoo Video, none of which have managed to fill YouTubes enormous shoes.
As said on this blog, the competition makes a huge effort in order to give their users as much freedom as YouTube does.
One of Youtubes relatively new tricks is the localization system. Several countries have their very own YouTube website, among which The Netherlands.
Another good thing to come from The Netherlands is YouTube phenomenon Esmee Denters, an 18 year old girl who started posting video’s on YouTube about a year ago. Now, her channel has 7.3 million views and over 82.000 subscribers. Her huge, mostly American fanbase attracted the attention of several American recordcompanies, among them Sony BMG.
In little over a year the young Ducth girl landed herself a recorddeal with Tenman Records, the new label of no one less than Justin Timberlake himself. He also took her on the European part of his world tour to open for him.
Esmee’s story is the absolute proof of the power of YouTube, reaching everyone from all over the world with video’s for everyone to see.
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