The acquisition of YouTube by Google provides a very interesting glimpse into the value of community and conversation in social applications. And while this acquisition has been over-hyped, over-analyzed and blogged to death, I figured it might be valuable to explore how YouTube created conversation in their social application. Indeed, that extant conversation created tremendous value – value that contributed to the price paid by Google.
It might be useful to first characterize YouTube as one of the more perfect examples of a long-tail site. Indeed, even the story of the site’s creation is long tail: The founders wished to create a site that would allow them to easily share personal videos with their friends. From inception, the site was designed to capitalize on micro-audiences – one friend sharing a video with her small, real-world social network – exactly the audience comprising the long tail.
Let’s analyze this a little bit. Sure, we all know that YouTube is a great place to go and look for stuff like Daily Show clips and music videos, but what exists beyond the surface? In a site like YouTube, Daily Show clips, viral video, etc. represent the head of the long tail. Indeed, there is a lot of traffic there, but it is transitive traffic. This traffic is comprised of people who get links mailed to them, follow blog links and the like.
However, if you conduct a random search for a term on YouTube, you’re likely to not find the Daily Show or viral videos with 500,000 views. In fact, you’re likely to find tons of content that has been viewed 1 or 3 or 10 or 15 times – and a lot of times that content doesn’t seem all that valuable to us. However, it is this content that drove YouTube’s valuation, and it is a very effective illustration of the value of the long-tail.
As we fill out a social network profile, or post pictures on Flickr, we are illustrating our identity and creating content for others. When we use social applications to create a representation of our identity, we are doing it for our social networks – people we want to impress and entertain. Each time we post a video on YouTube, we are creating content for our social network, the small group of people who benefit from our content creation.
Because video became cheap – our cellphones took videos and digital cameras recorded movies – it is only natural that we would want to take advantage of the channel to use it to communicate with friends. However, this required non-traditional thinking. This required us to stop thinking about video as a one-to-many (and very many at that) and start thinking of video as one-to-one or one-to-very few. Just as the average blog post has an audience of a just a few people, the average video posted to YouTube is just for a few people. And just as that average blog post is quite valuable to that small audience, that average YouTube video is extremely valuable to its small audience. The long-tail scale-free economics that support the blogosphere (and its A-list) are precisely at play in YouTube, creating an invaluable ecosystem.
This ecosystem, the one purchased by Google, came about because of innovative thinking and social architecture. For YouTube to go long-tail, a large percentage of users had to become content-creators. Of course, just as it is tough to find topics to blog about (requisite to being a “good blogger”), it is equally tough to find inspiration to create new video content. Therein lies the beauty of conversation. YouTube, just like the blogosphere, became a place for conversation – conversation that drove content production and flooded the system with interesting stuff for micro-audiences. And since YouTube was a walled garden, for conversation to be valuable it had to occur within the system – an individual on Revver conversing with a person on YouTube just didn’t work for that long tail of users.
The social architecture that enabled conversation in YouTube was built in, perhaps subconsciously, from the beginning. The founders built a site so they could share party videos with friends. The founders, while they probably have more friends now, likely had a relatively small social network. It was the millions of users like the founders, using the service in a similar fashion, that drove the value of YouTube. The fact the site also became the perfect home for viral videos and pirated video was completely secondary – they simply had the infrastructure to support the long-tail, hence the capacity to support non-long-tail uses. Other video sites that aren’t targeting the long tail are missing out on the social forces that drove YouTube – while people like viral videos, it is the long-tail of peer-produced content that keeps people coming back. It is the peer-production that enables conversation, and the iterative process that drives value back into the site. Without this value, a video sharing site is just expensive infrastructure built on a house of cards.
If you followed my blogosphere analogy, it seems to make sense that similar, Technorati-like services could emerge to break the walled-garden aspects of video sharing sites. If I like Revver or Vimeo or Clipshack I should be able to use these services and have conversations with YouTube users, right? That would be sort of like if WordPress.com users weren’t able to converse with Typepad users. Of course, with video thrown into play, things get a lot more challenging – but it would be useful to define some open standards on video conversation that will allow users on multiple sites to talk back and forth. While the Technorati of video likely wouldn’t index the video content, they would be able to examine standardized info (links, backlinks and trackback, etc) to find relationships between videos on different sites. Of course, this would require the video sites being willing to agree on a common format, and for YouTube to be willing to join the conversation. There’s a tremendous amount of potential value here.
YouTube, and most social sites, are about conversation. It is the conversation between users that drives the creation of content, and the network effects that make the network extremely valuable. YouTube serves as a highly illustrative and useful case study in designing a social architecture – hopefully you will be able to put it to work in your applications.
Tags: cognition, google, social networks, youtube
Perfect : I will use that one !
“As we fill out a social network profile, or post pictures on Flickr, we are illustrating our identity and creating content for others.”
To comment on wordpress I was compeled to do this Dam.
Excellent, I will made a quick post on that one. It’s one of the better analysis.
Funny everyone says that everything was already said about this deal — though you are the first one I’vge read who really give an anwser to the question: “Why buy a technology that they already have?”
About the Technorati for Video, I’m afraid its too simple an idea to happen: any couple of genius teenager might prove me wrong anytime, but Google obviously now knows the value of conversation and will make it possible anytime. Althemore that this is what MySpace was all about.
You got it! it’s all about getting people to talk…its the buzz factor.