mike_barton
Editor

YouTube: The new wasteland?

news
Oct 17, 20062 mins

In Google-YouTube deal is a new low for the Net, Ephraim Schwartz writes that Google’s purchase of YouTube has set off a flurry of analysts asking questions like, “Is this the bad old days of dot-com returning?” I am afraid these gurus are missing the point…

What Google is doing by paying $1.65 billion for a not-yet-profitable startup is declaring that if you do have market share — meaning millions of visitors — that alone can turn into huge revenues, thanks to Internet advertising.

YouTube gets something like 100 million page views per day. Does it matter that 99 percent of them are a waste of time? That these homemade videos have no redeeming quality? Not in the slightest. To whom should it matter?

So what’s hot on YouTube, and turning 2M page views? How about the topless sunbather spotted on Google Earth (original story).

“You need the sound up,” smh.com.au tech editor Stephen, author, says… Google Earth exposes topless sunbather.

Hutcheon said his clip was now the 5th most popular on YouTube this month, for obvious reasons.

So, LonelyGirl15 (later exposed as an actress from New Zealand looking to boost her career with the scripted YouTube presence) was sure to take off, it’s interesting from a viral and international perspective what’s popular outside of the PR buzz machine, now also tapping into the virtual world Second Life.

Australia’s multicultural TV network SBS thought so too. It did a story

about the subather clip on the old tube (clip here on YouTube), aiming to get to the bottom of what all the YouTube fuss is about.

Is YouTube the new vast wasteland, or will the revolution be televised (by YouTube)? Talk back to us below.

mike_barton

Mike Barton started out in online slinging HTML for CNET.com in the late 1990s and began his editorial career at New Media magazine shortly thereafter. In his early days, he was an editor at Ziff-Davis's PC Computing and ZDNet.com before heading Down Under, where he produced and edited the business and technology sections of The Sydney Morning Herald online. After returning to the States in 2006, he has worked for IDG's Infoworld, PCWorld, Computerworld, and CSO Online. He currently edits and produces WIRED.com's Innovation Insights, and is a contributing editor at ITworld.

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