Google Gobbles You Tube: Programmer Beware!
Yesterday Brian Leher did a show on the recent acquisition of You Tube by Google. Watch the founders message to it's audience HERE. I seldom call in, but he was asking how the audience uses You Tube and I felt compelled to share a filmmakers point of view. I was politely placed on hold and I patiently waited until he changed topics and it was apparent I wouldn't be adding my two cents.
Ah, thank the internet gods for blogs. Or maybe we should be thanking the Google gods.
As anyone who reads my blog knows, I post little movies on You Tube and then copy their code into other places like this blog. For traffic's sake, I will also post on Google video and I try to keep my latest 3 videos posted on my My Space page (they have a limit of 3). This is all to make it easier for people who don't know who I am to discover my little films. The reason why You Tube became popular in the first place is the lack of commercialism there. It's a bunch of people sharing their "content" with each other for the sole purpose of sharing and perhaps becoming popular. After all, the most watched videos are usually young girls driveling teenage angst to their webcams or dancing.
I do this for the innocent motivation of sharing my ideas with an audience and hopefully impact the viewer in some small profound way. But up until now, I haven't considered the commercial value of my movies. By the way, I hate calling what I do "content", but that seems to be what happens to anything, artistic or not, as soon as it hits the internet, it's called "content".
So now that Google has You Tube, Google will have to make their money back through advertising. How they will do it is unknown. Let's hope that it's those cute little text links called Google ads. Because of the You Tube’s demographic, I'm predicting garish, intrusive, sexually charged ads for stuff I don’t want. It's either that way or the idea of actually placing ads within the video. Hopefully, if this is the case, they will give the creator residuals of such ads like Revver. They may even throw an ad at the front of the video like Launch.com. Although this will be annoying, it still isn't the worse case scenario.
Some have figured out how to make money on their "content" without ad placement. I heard lonelygirl15 got a TV deal!?!? It's the larger corporations working on an older business model who are now getting nervous. They have to figure out how to get some of that money too. This is when it is all sure to start sucking. As soon as the huge corporations start generating their own “content” and running it past their test audiences and perform marketing analysis along with their need to "monetize"(place ads), the "content" will start looking like the very thing we were trying to escape: TV. And that is the worst case scenario. And again, we the people will have to compete with them or run away and find some other way to share with each other without the paws of capitalism corrupting our ideas.
Back to me: I can now make a movie for the pure joy of it and not worry about the politics and financial challenges of marketing it. Movie making for movie making sake. We would all like to believe that that is why we do it anyway, but we all know that marketing inevitably comes into play when you’re trying to get your movie seen. This knowledge can and usually does affect your decisions when writing and producing. Many an idea has died in my mind, because I realized nobody would want to see it and I would never be able to raise the money to produce it. Maybe it was a bad idea in the first place (most likely), but without that worry I’d go forward and find out later. The pure exercise of filmmaking can occur. It’s not shut down by commercialism before it begins. This is what outlets like You Tube have given me.
After making several short films for years and trying to get them into festivals (read: spend a lot of money, time and energy) and continuously being rejected by phrases like: "Thank you for submitting, but due to the overwhelming response...." and "Best of luck with your future endeavors... ", here came You Tube. No audience awards, no networking parties with free booze, but it was more of what it didn’t have that was the attraction: a gatekeeper. I could now email everyone I know and they could click in and watch my little movie. Or not.
Regardless of the commercialization of You Tube, their will always be an online outlet for my movies without commercials, but if I want them to be seen by an audience, I will probably have to shill for Nike or Hummer (Oh God, please no!!!). Like some blog ads, we probably won’t have a choice.
Adam Elend suggests that the most viral content will be able to demand the highest ad dollars. He’s right, but is this the game we want to play? Especially if the internet is going to look more and more like TV. Won’t we need to generate money (investors) and try to be accepted by the most viewed channels (gatekeepers)? For the time being, the internet still has the best potential for independent programming I am just scared of the not so distant future.
The point I'm trying to make here is that You Tube filled a niche that two major industries created. The film industry with it's lack of distribution efforts for shorts and TV with it's saturation of commercialism. That niche grew into a community that represents lost dollars in big money’s pocket and their coming after it. Programmers beware.