The vid-e-web

Posted on Jan 11, 2008. In The Web, Video.

Video on the internet is a big deal. A fair number of conversations I have contain the words “have you seen … on YouTube” and regional news even occasionally run a story on the latest ‘viral video phenomenon’. YouTube itself is so popular that it has completely proliferated our day-to-day lives.

We have come to expect to get any information we desire from the internet. If a teacher were to ask their students to write reports without using the internet they would be faced with an uproar. Try to do it yourself - research and write something without using the internet AT ALL, go on, I dare you. I fire up IMDB and look up the actors when I watch a film, check word definitions through Google, and solve arguments with Wikipedia. We can get any piece of information so quickly and easily it’s ridiculous, and we’re used to it, we expect it!

Looking up the names of the characters in The Raccoons on Wikipedia

And now we’re starting to expect the same immediacy from everything. We want the news as it happens with pictures and comment round the clock, we have our radio shows and music automatically downloaded at the click of a button, and we even want to connect with other people, without all that fuss of moving. The new ‘spirit of the web’ demands whatever it wants, wherever it is, however it desires.

But traditional video models - TV and film - aren’t suited to this ‘new way’. They’re timely and costly to produce, both of which don’t suit the ‘here, now, free’ new world order. What’s needed for the ‘now generation’ is quick and cheap production, content that can be produced fast and delivered faster, a streamlined approach. This approach is how user generated content (UGC), vodcasts, and vlogging exist.

But we can’t get away with producing crap (it’s a damn shame I know). The benefit of the fact that it is quick and cheap to produce (okay, okay…relatively speaking) means that there’s a lot of content out there. It comes down to simple economics - supply is high - so if the content is not up to scratch it fails it’s audience, gets ignored, and dies. This is true for content across all mediums, but the immediacy given to web content means that out here something either booms or dies, very quickly.

Our new video content is good value too, for the relatively low cost of production you can get a lot in return. Ad revenue is a big one, but brand exposure is equally important, as is the ability to build a community around a product.

The Cadbury gorilla
One such successful viral (note the views count)

The viral is the new big idea in marketing, and it can be worth huge sums of money. Imagine a workplace, a new video is discovered on YouTube, it’s entertaining, word about it spreads like wildfire, and soon it has tens of thousands of views. It may be a short-lived phenomenon but the exposure the brand behind the video has received can be enormously valuable. But video content doesn’t have to be from an ad campaign to be profitable, look at the huge followings of the vlogging drama lonelygirl15 or the vodcast Diggnation, the community around these is valuable in itself even if the content generates no cash revenue.

So I’m pretty excited about video on the web, but it’s okay because there’s a lot to get excited about. Check out the following for some of the great content being produced at the moment: