The YouTube problem

Submitted by acohill on Tue, 04/21/2009 - 09:06

A recent report says YouTube is losing more than a million dollars a day. Even for Google, that eventually adds up to a lot of money. Since Google acquired YouTube, the advertising giant has begun including advertisements on YouTube pages as well as embedding ads in some videos. But the huge cost of dishing out video to the world is still much higher than the ad revenue earned.

I think there is a longer term problem that will eventually force YouTube to change direction or even fade away: YouTube fatigue.

Remember when email first became really popular in the late nineties? Everyone you knew was busily forwarding every stupid joke they had heard, and you happily forwarded the jokes on to everyone you knew. Eventually we all tired of that and went back to work. Well, sort of. Instead of reading recycled jokes and forwarding them on, many of us are busily watching YouTube and forwarding links with "Watch this one...really funny! Ha ha!" to all our friends and family.

Here is the problem. If the average YouTube video runs 5 to 7 minutes, and you get an average of 10 "Watch this Ha ha" messages a day, you are easily spending an hour a day watching really stupid videos that you won't even recall an hour later. And you've wasted a perfectly good hour of your time--time you will never get back.

There is just not enough time in the day to watch all the video that's out there.

YouTube fatigue. Do you find yourself clicking the pause button on a five minute video 30 seconds into the video? If so, you probably have YouTube fatigue. There is only so much time in the day we want to spend watching really stupid time-wasting video. Over the past fifteen years, I've seen this "newbie" phenomenon over and over again as some new service (email, IM, chat, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) catches on and everybody rushes to try it out. Facebook fatigue is kicking in as people realize there is more to life than getting messages from hundreds of "friends" about the most inconsequential information ("...brushing my teeth, out of Crest so had to use Gleem...").

Online video is going to grow, and it will continue to grow until it completely replaces cable TV and to a large extent, satellite TV. But alternatives like Hulu and iTunes, with better content and paid, ad-free content will eat away at YouTube.