Viral Videos

  Move over MySpace, there’s a new king of high-traffic internet sites.  In a time of high-speed connections and program-it-yourself entertainment on demand, this was bound to happen.  YouTube has arrived. Today, 18 months after breaking virtual soil, it streams 70 million videos a day and is taking the world by storm.

  But like MySpace before it, YouTube’s success has prompted a flooding of the market—a market now replete with similar-service sites.  Just as FaceBook and TagWorld vied for MySpacers, a host of websites have begun to crop up with hopes of walking away with a chunk of the “viral video” cash cow.

  It’s only the first quarter, and still too early to predict an outcome in the online-video race; the cream hasn’t yet risen to the top.  The wheat and the chaff are still being separated.  But one thing is certain: the age of webcams, high-resolution camera phones, digital camcorders, easy uploading and no shortage of sites willing to host digital video (no matter how mundane) guarantees that this phenomenon will be around for as long as someone is willing to watch.

  Some may argue that video-on-demand sites like YouTube pose a threat to traditional television viewing—perhaps the same people who declared that iTunes was the next great threat to radio listenership.  I don’t buy it.  Just as the iPod provides a service that is different than radio, YouTube isn’t a cable channel.  It doesn’t do what television does. In the end, the iPod made the Walkman obsolete, not radio.  And I predict that YouTube and friends will become just another way to waste time at work.  You know, like MySpace.

  And speaking of MySpace, it’s a little early to count them out of this race.  Having just expanded video capabilities on the site, members can now upload their own videos and share them with friends.  MySpace also provides a boatload of exclusive video content, unavailable anywhere else on the web.  For example, this week MySpacers could watch exclusive interviews with Zach Braff and Method Man.

  With technology enabling a new generation of wannabe filmmakers to instantly distribute their virtual celluloid masterpieces worldwide, online video has become yet another outlet for the blogging set.  With these advances, a new term has entered the language: “vlog.”  Whereas “blog” is short for weblog, it’s no challenge to deduce that “vlog” is derived from video log.  And with a horde of sites hosting video almost indiscriminately, anyone with a webcam can have their own.  The downside is that you better make it good, because the competition is profuse.

  To explore the world of viral videos, you should probably start with YouTube.com.  You can also check out TV.blinkx.com, a video search engine.  If you’re posting your own videos, check out Revver.com, which actually pays you every time your video is viewed.  There are Google video and Yahoo video, too—not bad, but not the best.

  Just spend a little time surfing, and you’re sure to find something interesting.

-From Pulse
   August 24, 2006