Just a few months ago, MySpace realized that it was driving about 35-50% of the video plays on YouTube. Putting two and two together, the folks at MySpace decided to launch their own video service. As reported by HipMojo.com’s own Jackhammer, MySpace’s service still has a lot of improvement, but while the service has been less than perfect and prone to glitches like all things on MySpace initially, it turns out that already, at least according to FIM boss (and owner of MySpace) Ross Levinsohn, last week, users uploaded more video on MySpace than people did on YouTube.
This is not surprising. For one, MySpace has 65M users, that’s about 7-10 times more than YouTube. So if a fraction of MySpacers start to upload video on the site, the number of uploads will dwarf that of YouTube.
Of course, YouTube is a social networking site for online video, whereas MySpace is a social networking site that now allows for video uploads. Those are two fairly different things.
So when PaidContent.org is right to assert that YouTube automatically plays video clips whereas MySpace does not, that has more to do with the mindset and expectation of the user. On MySpace, if the videos played immediately, it would hurt the user experience, on YouTube, having videos load rightaway helps the user experience. This is why on HipMojo.com’s sister site, the video producer WatchMojo.com, we always automatically launch the video, because it’s a video and not a text site.
Translation: while it is a good business call for MySpace to offer video on its site, it should bear in mind what made it king of social networking and not try to alienate its base by shoving clips down their throat. Trust me, if people want to see videos on MySpace, you will know it (in other words, when the ratio between users, video uploads and plays diverges).
Finally, while it is true that the lion’s share of YouTube’s videos are the intellectual property of someone else and as such, not monetizable from an advertising standpoint, the truth is that MySpace’s videos would be mainly user generated, and not necessarily all that much more desirable to advertisers.
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May 1st, 2006 at 5:23 pm
[…] We also recently looked at MySpace’s video property here. […]