YouTube's Chad Hurley Writes Lame Article In Forbes

This week, Forbes published an article written by Chad Hurley on it's website. I don't know if the article also appears in print but I imagine it does since on the website it says it's published date is three days from now.

I expect Forbes to publish a better article than this. Chad spends the entire time talking about how YouTube allows new talent to be discovered and gives people the ability to get in front of a lot of eyeballs and basically just tells us all how great YouTube is. Come on. We all know that YouTube allows new talent to be discovered and allows users to get eyeballs to their videos that normally no one would ever see. Is that the best thing that you can write about?

What about writing an article that explains how you plan to monetize YouTube? Or maybe some details on how the revenue sharing will work for video advertising you plan on rolling out this summer? Why not tell us what it's been like integrating YouTube into the Google infrastructure? Or better yet, talk about when you plan on rolling out your content filtering technology and what that will entail.

There are so many things about YouTube and Google that people want to know about and probably need to know about that could have been discussed in detail in this article. But instead we just get another piece about how great YouTube is. Disappointing.

Comments

[John Farrell]

Couldn't have said it better. Building a business model around online video is something we all would like to hear/read more about.

[Andrew]

I just listened to Chad talk about the same things at the Musexpo in Los Angeles.

The whole presentation has entered the realm of cliche now.

the panel was made up of Martin Bandier - Chairman/CEO Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Ron Fair - Chairman Geffen, Nic Harcourt - music director KCRW, Chad Hurley - Co-Founder/CEO Youtube, and Steve Shnur, Worldwide Executive of Music and Marketing, Electronic Artists.

Essentially the label guys, Ron and Martin, are living in a world where they think that all of the changes in the music industry of late are horrors being inflicted upon them by the new media world...

At one point Ron said that his perfect way of distributing digital media would be to have people buy flashdrives with songs (DRM of course) that they want. i admit that I am obtuse, but beside the obvious, what is the difference between flashdrives and CD's? Little mention of downloads, sharing or anything not 1995.

The publishing guy was basically calling Youtube and its ilk thieves that built their companies off of the back of stolen music.

And Chad was talking about how great Youtube is for giving people the ability to share videos and talent to be discovered.

Chad got attacked, the labels doth protest, and the licensing guys were screaming about the sea change at hand, but apparently making little effort to adjust.

It was a sad state of affairs.

[KwangErn Liew]

Pardon my lack of business knowledge, but somehow I find that changes are happening so fast these days, they forgot what the essential ingredients are.

Find, YouTube is a great service for blablabla. But as you guys mentioned, monetization is vital for any business. They can bring in partnerships, adverts, what have you, but it's lots of giving, but nothing in return from the users, except user-generated videos, comments and lots of traffic.

Maybe in this era, business strategies have a different gear shift around the corners?

[Copperman]

There are a few models for monitizing digital media. One that most people shy away form is relationship marketing or affilaite marketing. Most people invite thier friends and family to share a discovery or product or service. So it was with the viral spread of YouTube or Hotmail. What is wrong with sharing the advertizing review in a multi-tired affiliate model?

[Mike McGrath]

If all you have is a service then that is all you can talk about...Meaning, you have to have a business model to talk about a business model...

[Angela]

I'm most interested in hearing more about YouTube's plans to share ad revenue with video producers. Right now many newspapers are posting videos on YouTube; They get good eyeballs, but it would be great if they could get some financial compensation too.