YouTube is 10 years old and without it, businesses like Streamabout, simply wouldn't exist. So hats off to YouTube...but....
What seems to be changing its dominance, is market behaviour and audience reaction. Bought by Google for 1.6 Billion usd in 2006, it's still not profitable despite revenues of 4 billion usd in 2014 - that's about break-even (which is ridiculous even in itself).
Faced with competition such as Vimeo, Vice, Vine, Snapchat and so on, makes life a bit harder for YouTube but their biggest threat is Facebook. The point is that when I see a video on a friends page on Facebook, it's probably something that I might like too - because they're friends and because they'll be 'like minded'. On YouTube, I have to search and search albeit through subscribed channels. So the viewing relevance is very different.
Facebook looks like a video sharing site, YouTube looks like a video hosting platform especially as you can upload video to Facebook directly rather than sharing a YouTube link giving Facebook ownership of the Ads.
The recent YouTube kids version marks a great initiative which brings back audience relevance as does, some of the channels - notably in Sport. But it's not as effective as Facebook even with over a billion monthly views. Facebook has 50% more views and produced nearly 3 billion usd in profit last year.
The growth of autoplay on Facebook (where videos automatically play when you see them) and currently on trial with Twitter - but not on Youtube - is a big failing.
One wonders is YouTube becoming complacent?
But one thing is for sure - it's all about Video, Video and more Video.
No comments:
Post a Comment