You Tube at a Fork in the New Media Road
With media professionals across the country wondering what will be the next major media vehicle, many fingers started pointing to the, now, ever popular YouTube. It is everything every advertiser wants in a website: popular, trendy, user-friendly, and very clickable.
As of now, YouTube is nothing more than a platform for possible guerilla campaigns for most advertisers. Much of its content is user-created. Also, viewers and users of YouTube want to be entertained, not (as we put it in our industry) “persuaded or convinced to drink ‘x’ percent more of a product.”
Before anyone can start relying on YouTube as a long-term media possibility, it needs to go through many steps. First of all, the site is much too cluttered to expect a large impression upon an audience. It would be very difficult to effectively place spots where they would reach an actual target. Secondly, there is a huge debate right now over the copyrighted content on YouTube. Many videos on the site contain private content that is being leaked over the web. TV shows, movie clips, etc. Viacom is the first major company to file a lawsuit against YouTube. The attached article goes into the story further and explains some possible outcomes.
Viacom vs. YouTube: Unasked Questions
At this point, YouTube is at the fork in the road of new interactive media. It has the potential to clean itself up and become an innovator in internet advertising. Or, it can run into the same problems that we saw with Napster several years ago where lawsuits cheapened the brand and the product. With the help of Google, it seems that YouTube has all of the resources it needs to take that next step in the right direction. I know that many advertising professionals are looking for the next weapon to battle the media fragmentation epidemic.
