Can 'GooTube' remain cool?
So it turns out GooTube, the nickname for YouTube, post-Google acquisition, that I reference in today's print column (below) was already in use. A guy who identified himself as Dan Aquino in an e-mail started three months ago as a mashup of YouTube home-for-sale videos and Google maps.
Also on the GooTube front, today's RedEye, the Tribune's paper for time-challenged young adults, has an on what it takes to get noticed amid the YouTube hordes.
Hint: Show some skin.
is the most obvious: GooTube.
sticky as the name implies, or as sticky as the old company, it will need to resolve potentially burgeoning copyright issues, fight literally hundreds of Web video competitors striving to catch up, and, most important, to remain, for want of a better word, cool.
Google can afford a lot of things, but the search behemoth can't afford Friendster, to name one site that burned white-hot then barely orange.
And if YouTube, which will keep its name, suddenly stops becoming the night, it will be a lot less cool.
If the next guy to discover combined puts the video up on vMix or Veoh instead, it will be a lot less cool.
And certainly if the YouTube community decides that Google empire is not, it will be a lot less cool.
Google's YouTube cool, says Greg Kostello, CEO and founder of vMix, a rival video site.
But there's good news for Google and, more important, for the 72 million monthly YouTube users.
The most likely scenario is none of the above. Most likely is that the site technology will get better, search capabilities within it will get a lot better, anyway.
YouTube will be able to continue its role as the launching pad to low-grade fame for lonely girls in their bedrooms, stand-up comics not yet on cable TV and stupid mint tricks.
Google, with its mastery of linking advertising to relevant content, will get to try to turn this amalgamation into a real business.
To be sure, YouTube will shed its old, relatively safe status of all traffic/no revenue. Its pockets will go from sewn shut to deep.
And copyright holders, realizing they are now dealing with the marquee subsidiary of the grand success story (so far) of the Internet era, will come calling.
Visitor No. 1 might well be Viacom, whose Comedy Central channel contributes scores of pirated Daily Show, South Park and Colbert Report bits to YouTube and, thus far, has not asked publicly to have them taken down.
The channel won't comment on the question of why not, but the obvious assumption is it's decided the clips are more likely to bring new viewers than subtract old ones.
issues. Not long before the Google deal was announced, YouTube signed a in the copyright community, the giant Universal Music Group.
And it has a deal with CBS, Comedy Central's corporate sibling.
A lot of the appeal of YouTube is the immediate access to copyrighted content, Kostello says. If they don't have that, isn't the audience going to be disappointed?
Keeping that audience happy and growing is the key question. As Kostello and others have noted, Google isn't making site.
It's buying the young and passionate audience that visits YouTube, accountable for almost half the traffic to big video sites and 9 percent of all video streaming on the Web, according to audience-measurement firms.
Not even the power of Google's dominant Video.
Google has never figured out community, Kostello says. are interested in clips.
Keeping those users from jumping ship over matters of corporate principle probably won't be too hard. Right now, the site is full of, naturally, user videos protesting the sale (as well as a disarming one from the YouTube founders, pledging fealty to the founding idea of a loose, creative community).
But don't expect this to turn into a full-fledged movement.
The evidence is in MySpace. The giant social networking site has quadrupled its site visits since being purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., and there's no planet on which, in the eyes of young Web users, Google is more of a corporate devil than News Corp.
The biggest challenge for Google will instead be on the cultural level. Right now, there's no video clips, whether amateur or professional.
But what happens when the novelty wears off, when you've seen, say, the 12th video of a healthy eater dancing and mouthing the lyrics to a techno hit, and it's no longer quite so hilarious?
What happens when you've made your 10th confessional video and, still, nobody in the YouTube community seems to care?
Google's real challenge isn't to sell ads or negotiate licensing fees. It's to keep online video interesting enough so that its current fans don't wander off to whatever comes next.
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sajohnson@tribune.com In Hypertext, Internet critic Steve Johnson attempts comment on what's new and/or interesting on the Web from the perspective of a user, rather than a business writer or a gadget freak. He also reserves the right to digress.
For his recent in-print writings, . For e-mail, use , although 'A' is not his middle initial. Comments are reviewed before posting in an effort to remove foul language, commercial messages, irrelevancies, unfair attacks and suspiciously accurate descriptions of the blogger's darkest fantasies.
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