JOHN DVORAK'S SECOND OPINION
BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- YouTube, the privately-held video sharing website, now delivers an estimated 100 million videos a day to its users. The site has been online for barely a year.
It's growth rate is phenomenal and without precedent, skyrocketing into the public consciousness and becoming commonplace nearly overnight. So what do the journalists, analysts and pundits all do when they witness this moment in history? Kvetch.
Nobody actually wants to understand exactly why this happened in the first place. Instead you hear the following (and typical) Silicon Valley commentary. "How are they going to monetize it?" "It's the dotcom bust 2.0!" "There must be a video bubble." "They're burning through $1.5 million a month. How can they continue?"
It's weird but almost nobody looks at this tremendous growth curve and asks themselves, "Holy cripes! How did that happen!?!" Instead you get headlines such as "Is YouTube the next Napster?"
Apparently YouTube has stumbled on to something and perhaps we should try and understand that in itself. If and when the company manages to "monetize" (don't you love that term?) things may change.
And you must assume that with all the marketing brains out there one of them can find a way to make money. I'm more concerned about why this product exploded the way it did. I'll critique the money-making scheme when it appears.
So let's look at what caused the growth. And let's note that this company is hardly the first on the block to let users share video. Google video, in fact, looks a lot like YouTube, but never achieved this growth despite getting a big head start.
Two things seem to be at work. The first is the incredible desire people have to share video clips with each other. That's now apparent.
What's not so apparent, unless you actually have tried to use the various video sharing sites, is that nobody -- and I mean nobody -- made it easy until YouTube.
By merely combining a pent-up demand with ease-of-use you get the YouTube phenomenon. It's brain dead simple, but I'm telling you that is all there is to it.
The hardest part of the process is the user managing to get the video onto a computer where it can be uploaded to YouTube. Nowadays with digital camcorders and still cameras that shoot .MOV files it is not that hard and most cams come with software to make it easier.
Then comes YouTube. The first thing you notice about YouTube is the lack of barriers to entry. You can sign up quickly and upload anything in any format right away.
YouTube's computers then transcode (convert) your files into Flash movies which can be played on any browser. They also provide a link to the video which you can email as well as some embedded code so you can post the video on your own website and play it from there.
Since I like to run videos on my blog this turns out to be a great way to both transcode and save bandwidth since YouTube picks up the tab on the video stream.
Would I pay for this service, yes.
I have seriously looked at the alternatives to YouTube. With no exceptions they are all flawed.
It's amazing that the YouTube formula for success is simply ease-of-use and convenience. A shocker, huh?
Some sites require endless forms to fill out. Others, such as copycat newcomer Metacafe which cannot even transcode the ubiquitous MOV file, are useless for personal digital cam vids.
Other sites have weird limitations or do not provide embedding code. It's one thing or another.
One of the community video sites for "citizen journalists" wants the hapless user to transcode the video themselves before uploading it. Most people don't have a clue how to do that.
Even Google can't get it right. I'm hoping that the founders of YouTube Chad Hurley and Steve Chen realize that they may be subtle geniuses insofar as ease-of-use is concerned.
I want to see more from these two no matter what happens to YouTube.
