There have been a lot of stories in the impatient press about YouTube's inability to find a suitable business model. Themes range from "How are they going to monetize it" to "Is YouTube the new
Napster?" to "There must be a video bubble." John C. Dvorak of MarketWatch wants everyone to calm down to take a second to appreciate that a site that's barely a year old now delivers roughly 100
million videos a day. Don't worry that the online video phenom has yet to find a way to make money: remember Google? The search engine came years before SEM. "You must assume that with all the
marketing brains out there one of them can find a way to make money," Dvorak says. It's perhaps more important that we appreciate that the phenomenon is going on, and maybe try to figure why. First of
all, it's now abundantly clear that people have a massive desire to share video clips with each other. But Why YouTube? Because, as Dvorak says, "nobody--and I mean nobody--made [sharing video] easy
until YouTube." There are almost no barriers to entry: you can upload video from any format or any software you please and the site automatically converts your files into Flash movies. "I have
seriously looked at the alternatives to YouTube," he says. "With no exceptions they are all flawed." Funny how it should all come to down to ease-of-use and convenience, huh?
Read the whole story at MarketWatch »
