Love him or hate him, you have to admit that Mark Cuban is remarkably consistent. He has been down on the Google acquisition of YouTube from day one. His latest Blog Maverick post continues the thread. Mark's analysis of a recent selection of "most watched" GooTube videos is compelling, while it shows the videos themselves to be, well, not so compelling at all. And this isn't a rant against user generated content, per se.
From Mark's post - "What's interesting is that Gootube has gone corporate. Its primary application is to host commercials. Commercials for TV shows. Commercials for Products. Commercials for cheesy websites. Gootube may host a bunch of user generated content, but thats not what people look at."
Mark questions whether this is the "future of TV" and notes that, of GooTube's top 20 videos, nearly all are either uploaded commercials or scams disguised as pornography (it's hard to tell what purpose some of these serve, but a few appear to have been created by new vloggers looking to garner attention - to that end, I suppose their trickery worked...) A mere 3 out of 20 are actual user generated content. Sounds a lot like your email box without a SPAM filter, doesn't it? SPAM has all but killed email marketing, is a blight among social networks and is now becoming the heart of the GooTube product offering. Sad...
See the full post at Blog Maverick.
I knew Cuban back in the day, before Yahoo! acquired Broadcast.com, when we were both hacking away, trying to turn internet radio into a business. Back then, we certainly had our share of disagreements. Ironically, one thing we did agree on was the massive, industry-changing impact online radio would have. This was back in 1999 and I still have a print out from Kurt Hanson's Radio and Internet Newsletter (RAIN) wherein Kurt roundly (and rightly) trounces the two of us for being (shall we say) a wee bit optimistic about consumer interest in listening to radio stations over the internet.
But when it comes to GooTube, he makes a strong argument that the honeymoon is over.
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