Larry Magid: Yahoo!'s Video Service Puts Content Creators First; Will Compete With YouTube
SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS)— Yahoo! appears to be getting ready to launch a new video service that aims to challenge YouTube by tapping into their viewers.
Ad Age is reporting that the Sunnyvale-based company is in talks with video producers ahead of the launch, which is planned for this summer. YouTube, owned by Google, is a behemoth. Is it even possible for the much older company to stand a chance?
You can challenge it, but you can't unseat it. I think this might be another example of a Yahoo! initiative that doesn't go as far as it wants to go. I can understand why they'd want to do this, considering YouTube is a very profitable venture by having the ability to embed ads in other people's videos.
Yahoo!'s Video Service Puts Content Creators First; Will Compete With YouTube
With Yahoo!'s model, they actually plan on giving more of the ad revenue to the content creator. It still depends on the amount of hits a web traffic generated by the content, but this is one way they are differentiating themselves by being more generous, according to reports.
But as far as getting people to stray from the almighty YouTube, I'm not so sure. In the tech world, not being first to market is a huge disadvantage. Take Bing for example. It's a great search engine, but it hasn't even put a dent in Google's users.
There's really nothing to differentiate what Yahoo! plans on doing from YouTube from a consumer angle, but for content creators, the incentive is in the money shared. At the end of the day, for this to work, people have to want to go there to search for videos in the first place.
I'd like to see the competition and I wish Yahoo! good luck, but I'm a bit skeptical.
