For pure vloggers, the ones with a Webcam, a few thoughts to share, and a comment for everything that happens around them, trolls of the long tail emerged in the video space to crash the goody-goody early vloggers party. Vloggerheads is the symbol of that group of people separating from the mainstream video platform to preserve their values.
For businesses, it became a reality almost right away that selling through Youtube was useless. If a video is crappy, it's not by being on Youtube that it will magnify. Spammers - or the art of gaming the system to get views (fake thumbnails, autoplay, automatic comments, tags, title, Google SERPs... - are the only survivors of this scene. Tricking people into clicking on video is the only way to create attention when you are directly selling something on Youtube.
Video responding, or video comments, have migrated outside of Youtube on sites that brought real innovation and ease of use: Viddler and Seesmic to name only the most successful ones to my opinion. Seriously, with Viddler, your comments are embed in the video, following it wherever it is being pasted online. With Seesmic, the video comment thread is inside the embed video. I personally think the design is confusing and not appealing, but I give props to the company for making it happen.
So what is left of Youtube? Where is the edge? First, for sure, the company can scale to millions of video views per day, everyday. Revver for example will slow way down when things get a little hot in here. Sure Youtube streamed 5 billion videos last july, making it the leading video platform on the market, way ahead of its competitor Fox Interactive which accumulated 300 million views in the same month.
However, Youtube probably gets a lot of visits from Google's SERPs, and we know that Google's search algorithm tends to bring Youtube video content on top of natural results.
Also, Youtube is the victim of a lot of hacks. The most popular video ever on Youtube was pointed out by core Youtubers to be a hack, probably a mixture of autoplay, automatic page refresh and IP address generator (the mix that gets you high!). That's kind of a downer to know that the most popular content on the platform grew on the back of the platform's weaknesses.
In the end, Youtube is like a nineteenth-century Parisian train station. Its popularity is due to the fact that it was built during the industrial times of the Web, so it is interconnected with all the other main transportation channels. But really, the place is old, rusty and cranky. No community will find a secure environment in Youtube. It has become so huge that you don't feel secure to hang there anymore and post personal stuff.
And I'm not even talking about their unattractive partners' program...
For anybody who is a little serious about online video, Youtube is not the premium choice. This is exactly why - if they keep being slow on innovation - Youtube will be left behind. There are new emerging behaviors around videos: embed comments, rev-share, easy video response, customizable video players (and not just colored border), and Youtube is not picking those up. I was making more views on Youtube than I do on Revver now, but at least Revver shares the small ad-generated revenues made with my videos, and they don't impose their logo on my videos. Goodbye Youtube. You had a good run.
