Author: Tom Slee

YouTube Becomes Big Business

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It's one of those hoary old sayings – it's been around for maybe two whole years now – that while the Geezer Generation of passive consumers watched network TV, the Net Generation of cool participators go on YouTube and do their creative teenage thing. But it's no longer either/or. A few recent milestones highlight how YouTube is changing.

First, Avril Lavigne pipped a homegrown video to be first to 100 million viewers and now "six of the 10 most-watched videos of all time are straight music videos."

Second, CBS has reached an agreement with Google to show full-length TV shows on YouTube.

Third, Tina Fey's Sarah Palin sketches for Saturday Night Live have been watched more times on the Internet than on TV. Says the Associated Press:

There were 10.2 million people watching the season-opening "Saturday Night Live" when Fey first appeared as Palin, with Amy Poehler portraying Hillary Clinton, according to Nielsen Media Research. These days, that's a good-sized audience for prime-time, let alone late-night, TV.
Another 1.2 million people captured the episode on their DVRs and watched within the week. Through the middle of last week, NBC estimated that it had streamed the skit online more than 13 million times. Those are just the numbers NBC can keep track of; the skit was undoubtedly captured and posted or e-mailed many more times.
NBC perfected "widget" technology only a few months ago, allowing video of its material to be captured across the Internet while retaining a tie to the network's Web site. It has aggressively marketed the Fey skits to political and comedy blogs…
…There's also the chance for even more revenue. Only in the past few weeks has NBC Universal perfected the technology to place a movie studio advertisement at the end of the clip it distributes online. Pre-clip advertising would add even more value.

It's not actually YouTube – as the article says, NBC now posts its own videos and removes them from the YouTube site when viewers post there – but these developments show that Internet viewing can be complementary to, not competitive with, mainstreamTV.  And "going viral" is no longer reserved for amateur guitar players. In fact, in an example of the centripetal web, the Internet now lets US Network productions go where they could not go before – you can now watch Fey/Palin in the UK on the Guardian and The BBC web sites. 

Whether TV networks will end up hosting their own material a la NBC, or whether there will be more CBS-style Google/network deals that see the networks outsourcing the hosting to YouTube in return for a slice of the advertising money, who knows? But the trend is clear; the confrontation between Internet and TV is coming to an end. The old enemies were perhaps never really at each others throats, and now they will cohabit happily. And while YouTube will continue to host amateur videos (why not?) it will make money from the music videos and the TV networks as it moves to higher-quality images and longer shows. Google's expanded YouTube advertising initiatives will help these deals along.

The Carr-Benkler wager is looking more and more like a win for Carr.

How Long Will This Post Survive?

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Will this post still be here on November 1, 2008? Definitely. I'm not going to remove it and I don't see anyone else doing so.

Will it be here on November 1, 3008? Surely not.

So how long will be here? My guess is about 10 years but I'd be interested in your guesses too. 

When it goes, how will it go? The most likely cause of deletion is that I stop blogging and Six Apart deletes my blog. Right now I pay them $5 per month for hosting this blog, and if I stop paying them they say "After cancellation, you will no longer have access to your website and all information contained
therein may be deleted by Six Apart. " I would guess that I'm unlikely to want to blog for more than a few years. I've been doing it for — pause for quick look up — nearly three years, and regular readers will know I have to pause for breath even now. I don't think this post exists anywhere else; a search for whimsley on the wayback machine shows nothing, so that would be it.

Do Six Apart actually go round deleting the blogs of people who stop subscribing? I don't know although actually I doubt it. At least one typepad blog, the wonderfully named "wit of the staircase" by a now-deceased author is still around. But if they do delete it, probably this post will vanish sometime between 2013 and 2020.

Another way it could go is if Six Apart fold. They are privately owned so their finances are not public, but from what I can tell it's a small operation and they have a history with blogging so I would guess they make enough to pay the rent and more.

But it's not just about this blog post of course. If you sign up with Blogger then it costs nothing, so they don't know when you've stopped posting. So even after you stop, and even after you die, your pages will presumably still be there so long as Google's servers are around.

So if this post survives the most likely issues with Six Apart, what will get rid of it? It's difficult to imagine it being here in 100 years but equally difficult to imagine what, short of global cataclysm, will get rid of it.

Any guesses? 

WikiBollocks: Tapscott DigiDemocracy Hype Shock Horror

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Don Tapscott gets it all wrong about  the "Net Generation": 

[T]he new generation is turning into a political juggernaut that will dominate and change U.S. politics in the future. ..  They have at their fingertips the most powerful tool for informing, organizing and mobilizing. What's more, they know how to use it effectively, by communicating directly with each other, instead of waiting for orders from campaign headquarters.
And they won't settle for politics as usual. Having grown up digital, they will want to be involved in the act of governing by contributing ideas before decisions are made. What's more, they'll insist on integrity from politicians; if politicians say one thing and do another, they'll use their digital tools to find out, and spread the news.
Along with possibly being a decisive factor on Nov. 4, afterward they'll shake up the business of government. No matter who wins, the new president will have a tiger by the tail.

Lots of young people are voting for Obama & Young people use the Internet => The Net is giving rise to a new era of participation and blah blah blah.

If he had waited a day and watched the Canadian results he would have seen that there is no evidence of a boom in young voters here. The overall turnout was way down and there is no indication in the results or elsewhere of a significant boom in young voters (although it may be up from the historic low of 25% of the 18-24 age group in 2000). And  yes, Canadian youth use the Internet. 

For anyone not completely committed to Wikibollocks the conclusion is obvious: youth participation in the US is more to do with the Big Eared One than with Facebook. But The Globe and Mail just print this junk anyway.

Tapscott's Wikinomics was abysmal, and I see his new Grown Up Digital is at 4000 in the Amazon rankings. I think I'm going to have to give my blood pressure a boost and read the damn thing. Watch this space.

Election prediction (Not that one, the Canadian one)

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We won't know who the PM is until mid-day tomorrow. Will it be minority Tory or Liberal-led coalition? Talks continue through the day until … they fall apart. And it's back to the status quo. Oh, and the Greens take a single seat as May wins.
The nice thing about blog predictions is you can always edit your posts to fit reality.

Blogging for the Man

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I recently volunteered for extra work for no extra pay, so my day job now includes blogging. Not interesting to most people who read this, or indeed to anyone not intrigued by the mysteries of BlackBerry programming or data synchronization with the occasional smartphone-market comment thrown in. But it's here anyway.

And for more compulsive volunteering, you can watch my attempt to get people to vote for the admirable Cindy Jacobsen as our local candidate in the Canadian election here.

Letter to the Globe and Mail

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Dear Editor,

On today's front page we learn about the sad killing of a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan, with a poignant photograph and personal stories. 

On page A13 a single small paragraph in the "In Brief" section tells us that NATO forces killed two Afghan civilians. There are no names, no pictures. Not even the age or gender of the victims.

Tom Slee