YouTube, I tube, we all tube?

Posted Apr 30th 2006 5:27PM by Sarah Gilbert
Filed under: Products and Services, Newspapers, Competitive Strategy, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Time Warner (TWX)

Or, as Ted Leonsis goes, so goes the world. Everybody's doing YouTube and (as he wrote, and we covered last week), AOL's Ted Leonsis is one of them. In the Washington Post [registration required], the YouTube phenomenon is reviewed and the writer notes that all the biggies are launching video sharing sites of their own; we've got AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! all on the list as of last count.

The concept - that users create their own videos and upload them - seems more of a play for a company that doesn't already own lots of video-ready content (i.e., Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft) than one that does (i.e., AOL). Video content is expensive for corporations to create, but very cheap for individuals.

But can any of them match the success of the seemingly grass-roots upstart, YouTube (actually a heavily-venture-capitalized firm founded by early employees of PayPal)? If even the execs at the would-be competition are lauding YouTube, I have to wonder.

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