As everyone knew, YouTube was way, way ahead in users and uploaded content. I did some quick checking, on queries like “athens” and “mcdonalds” and found that there were typically between 4X and 12X as many videos uploaded to YouTube as to Google Video. This stuff isn’t going away.
There are over 3,300 videos about “backyard wrestling” at YouTube. Barely over 300 at Google Video. (Sounds like Hal Niedzviecki needs a new chapter to his book, Hello, I’m Special, which probes the “backyard wrestling” “look at me I’m famous for 15 nanoseconds” phenomenon. Talk about a long, long, long tail.)
For this one, you may need subtitles along with the 3+ spare minutes, but it illustrates the point further. Google Video had fewer than 20 videos about “Tim Hortons” and YouTube, 218 and climbing. Very little of that content is copyrighted or ripped off, either. A lot of it is very (very, very) stupid, but it does seem to have almost a social networking component, as even the dorkiest dudes may find themselves described as “hot” by a “jen4353” who lives very far from those dudes.
Flickr, by contrast, has 845 photos tagged Tim Horton’s.
There’s a long way to grow. Sure, there are thousands of photos of people in a McDonald’s, or Tim Horton’s, or landmarks in Athens. But I can find zero of anyone drinking a beer in the Athens McDonald’s. Let that be my challenge to you. And no, you can’t drink a beer in Tim Horton’s. Not unless they build one in Athens.
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Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients’ paid search marketing campaigns.
In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed “guide to portals” which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.
