Stagnation on youtube

A brief intro:

This time a decade ago, no one had even heard of youtube, nor did the bandwidth really exist for the project.  The emergence of Youtube was unforeseen by, well lets be real, everyone.  Microsoft was left standing, as was Google.  The access of users to cheap video editing equipment, and further simultaneously given access to the vast array of various uploaded media clips led to an explosion of creativity.

     However as time progressed, expectedly those who did well acquired a disproportionate amount of the traffic.  Now, I don’t have the figures, but a comparative handful of users provide the significant lions share of the traffic.  This has had two detrimental effects on youtube.

1)      The forum has lost a significant portion of its vibrancy, in that it used to be that you could come back to youtube in a week or twos time and everything would be different.  This is not true anymore.  You come back in months time and it’s pretty much the exact same people doing exactly the same thing.  It’s no longer really youtube, but the ‘same old-same old’tube.

2)      The barriers to entry are now essentially prohibitively high.  As a few get a large amount of the traffic, the barriers to entry are huge compared to what they were when youtube was relatively a flat and fair forum.  Indeed almost the only way to now establish yourself on youtube is with the help of someone who is already established, or to have an existing audience for whom you start making videos, or to simply have a truck full of cash to throw at the problem.

    So is there a solution to this?  Is there a way that youtube can regain it’s vibrancy?  Well that’s where many minds are better than one and I ask for your take on this.

    The following is my suggestion:  One way to do this which is arguably dead before it starts is by biasing the YT search algorithms against established players.  Now YT will not want to do that on several levels.  Firstly ‘established players’ are the ‘cash cows’, they are the ‘known commodities’ that people come to youtube for.  Secondly of course, those partner would be pretty unhappy having put all that work into establishing a channel merely for YT to come along and decide ‘bad luck fellas, but YT needs more variety’.   It would also send a lousy message about the relationship between media producers and youtube.  Finally of course, who is likely to fill this gap?  Lamentably imitation is easier than innovation and for every youtube ‘celebrity’ there are probably 10 wannabe clones.  Even if youtube were to tweak its search engine, would it really help?

     Maybe a more viable alternative is to create a second ‘pool’ of users.  A ‘youtube hatchery’ so to speak that allows small channels to grow free of the competition of the bigger players (a different front page).  Limit the hatchery to users with less than 10k subscribers or so, and have a separate front page for them.  The environment would allow people to establish themselves on a smaller forum before competing in the full YT forum where currently they get almost no attention.

     Other than that, it looks to me like youtube has matured and hardened into its adult form, never to see significant changes again, or if it does, it will be more akin to glacial speeds!

Sunday July 10th (The Old Friend)

Up relatively late, well after sunrise, and rolled on down the road to Montrose.  Montrose was a place where I had a spot of bother a few years earlier where driving in the late dusk, only to have a giant truck tire materialize out of the dark where the lights didn’t penetrate.  I didn’t even have time to react, and plowed straight through it.  My only thought at the time was ‘Im going to luck to survive this’ as there was the massive thunk and the car jumped from the impact.  Maybe a second later, and much to my own surprise I still had the steering wheel in my hand and was in control of the car.  In disbelief I carefully slowed down and eased the car to the side of the road, watching in the rear mirror as at least one other pair of headlights swerved and jumped as they hit the truck tire among the smoke of locked wheels burning rubber.  Another guy also  stopped, as visibly shaken as myself, and we chattered for half an hour, telling each other over and over our frighteningly similar stories while comparing the damage to our vehicles.  Mine had fared much worse and was visibly leaking coolant.  That was bad, real bad.  Without coolant the car will overheat and destroy the engine in fairly short order, and I was still 50 miles outside Mostrose.  The guy who had shared my fate with the truck tire decided escort me to Montrose, just to make sure I made it, and get me to a radiator place.  I made it only to find out the next morning there was no real chance of getting it fixed in Montrose.  Further I had realised early on the AC was fracked, although I didn’t find out till later the AC radiator is in front of the engine radiator, and so had taken the brunt of it.  This had clearly caused the AC coolant to evaporate.  Eventually had to drive, very carefully to Colorado Spring to get the car fixed.

However this time all I was up for was to find a coffee shop to upload some stuff.  Spent the day preparing talks, and uploading things like the Phelps interview.  Rolled out in late afternoon towards Durango, and enroute I saw a sight!  An Old Friend from way back, Mount Sneffles.

Sneffles isn’t just one of Colorado’s 14 000 footers, its impressive.  Indeed when I first saw it, my first thought is, I have GOT to climb that thing!  Two days later I did 🙂 and it’s still one of my most fond memories of the West.  You really do feel on top of the world on that mountain, almost on a pillar with the ground dropping away on every side.  Looking down on one side to the jagged ridges of the Sneffles range, and on the other over the gentle hills to other distance mountain ranges of the Rockies.  The hike shattered me though.  You really need a 4×4 with high clearance to make it up to the trailhead (Yankee Boy Basin), and my polite, under-powered, and heavily laiden Little Blue NYer barely made it up the two wheel drive portion of the dirt road (and even that was incredibly hairy and touch and go!).  Still, one of the reasons I’ve been kitting the aerial video rigs up with HD cameras etc, and trying to get stuff sorted for remote piloting even at this obscene altitude is to fly from the top of Sneffles.  However while I hope to get up Sneffles before the end of this year, the time is not now.  I have a conference to prepare for and the I have to get my ass over to TAM (The Amazing Meeting) by saturday 😦 .