{"id":185,"date":"2007-08-13T13:14:04","date_gmt":"2007-08-13T18:14:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/2007\/why-youtube-became-so-big-so-fast-and-what-its-growth-can-teach-you-about-the-web\/"},"modified":"2007-08-13T14:31:36","modified_gmt":"2007-08-13T19:31:36","slug":"youtube-and-web-traffic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/2007\/youtube-and-web-traffic\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Youtube became so big so fast and what its&#8217; growth can teach you about the Web"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image186\" src=\"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/08\/picture-1.png\" alt=\"youtube logo\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Youtube is the new big thing on the Web. But you have to wonder why Youtube got so big so fast? <\/p>\n<p>&#8230; Consider that there are web sites that have existed long before Youtube and did the exact same thing &#8211; user generated videos\/video sharing.<\/p>\n<p>As a web designer\/web developer, my first instinct would be to look at:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Functionality<\/li>\n<li>Usability<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>I found that Youtube is very good in both camps (for the most part,) but so are several other video sharing sites.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The answer to Youtube&#8217;s success:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Youtube went to the top because of content. <\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, the content that drives Youtube is the content that the other big video sharing sites (ethically) removed from their websites &#8211; all the professionally produced videos.<\/p>\n<p>.. We all like to see videos of cats falling off tables once in a while, but let&#8217;s be honest, most of us go to Youtube to see copyrighted videos:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Daily Show<\/li>\n<li>Colber Report<\/li>\n<li>Family Guy<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8230; etc.<\/p>\n<p>While the other video sharing sites removed copyrighted material, Youtube turned a blind eye (at least that is what I think,) and Youtube saw its&#8217; traffic skyrocket.<\/p>\n<p>So now Youtube is being sued left and right &#8230; they deserve it. If someone was selling ad space from an audience largely attracted by my hard work (not that would ever happen &#8230;) I would be pretty pissed off.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Side note:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>My relatively simple video tutorials take a while to produce: you are taking about 5-7 hrs of work (easily) for every hour of video! <\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p>Google says (Google bought Youtube) that in September it will introduce its&#8217; video filtering technology and flush out the stolen content. I wonder if Youtube&#8217;s traffic will go the way of Napster? <\/p>\n<p>Just in case you forget; Napster was the big name in music sharing (again stolen content,) until they were sued and forced to remove all the big-name songs. Napster has since fallen off the radar &#8230; no content.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Content is King:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>That was the first rule of web design I learned back in 1994: <strong>content is king<\/strong>. You have to have good usability etc .. but at the end of the day, a web site needs good content. <\/p>\n<p>&#8230; And that (my nerd friends,) is what Youtube and Napster can teach us about the Web. <\/p>\n<p>Thanks for reading,<\/p>\n<p>Stefan Mischook<\/p>\n<p>www.killersites.com<br \/>\nwww.killerphp.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Youtube is the new big thing on the Web. But you have to wonder why Youtube got so big so fast? &#8230; Consider that there are web sites that have existed long before Youtube and did the exact same thing &#8211; user generated videos\/video sharing. As a web designer\/web developer, my first instinct would be &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.killersites.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}