Bruno Guglielminetti, seen above giving a video update from what appears to be an airport bathroom stall, has become the latest journalist to discover that it’s easier to simply upload videos to YouTube than deal with his company’s complicated proprietary system.
The advantages of YouTube are pretty astounding:
- Free storage space, which means you don’t have to worry about server maintenance, technical support or web programming
- Familiar interface to web users, instead of the Windows Media, RealVideo or Quicktime systems that half the audience might not have the proper plugin for
- A much, much, much larger audience of millions of web surfers who might stumble upon your video through search, instead of the few dozen people who might reach it through a direct link from the media outlet’s website
- The ability to share advertising revenue with Google, a company that understands Internet advertising a heck of a lot better than those kids you have trying to sell print ads.
Given that, why don’t more non-television media outlets mothball their video systems and just switch to YouTube?
The main reason is control: They want 100% of all that ad revenue they’re not getting. They think they can do everything because they did everything in print. They don’t trust some outside company to handle this for them. And they don’t want to throw away something they spent thousands of dollars getting the CEO’s nephew to develop over the weekend.
On the other hand, many of these same websites use Google Ads, Google Analytics and Feedburner.
When it comes to video, I think they’ve hit the wrong side of this equation.
The evidence can be seen on their own blogs. Look at how many of them embed YouTube videos, or even unofficially upload their own videos to YouTube because they can’t figure out their company’s proprietary system.
Bruno’s step makes sense. Let’s hope others follow. And not just with YouTube. They should have channels on Vimeo, Blip.tv, Metacafe and others. Their business shouldn’t be in distribution, it should be in content.
