Obviously, my goal isn’t to present you these services that you know as well as I do. I’m not even trying to draw a detailed portrait of theses websites. No, no! My main purpose is to report some facts and address a few questions about the leaders of the UGC video sharing websites. These will obviously relate to our obsession matter of interest: musical instruments. As I am not aiming to write a book about this topic, I will focus on two of the leaders in the video sharing field, Youtube and Dailymotion. If I need to, I will talk about their challengers later.

Honor to whom honor is due… To date, when you talk about online video sharing, pretty much everybody will think Youtube, and as a matter of fact most of the people will browse for hours through the Youtube videos… The company took less than 4 years to achieve a worldwide leadership on the video sharing field via a very generalist approach and a lot of experiments. It is pretty simple, almost everything you look for is on Youtube and if you’re not afraid to spend long hours of research and viewing, the resource is virtually endless. Youtube used to have a bad reputation because of the poor quality of the videos. However, last year, once they’ve established their leadership, they’ve enabled HD video to their users (they call it HQ). Though they did this quite secretly (no announcement and not on all the videos) this is a move forward to catch their challengers on the field of quality.

BB King used to sing Pay the cost to be the boss, and it sounds like a statement if you think about Youtube. The company is not profitable yet despite (yeah you’re right I should say because of) a gigantic traffic and a very active users community. An analyst from the Credit Suisse predicted that Youtube should be losing 470 million $ for the year 2009. Isn’t that vertiginous?

Even though Youtube is running the race ahead of its challengers, it is not the only actor in the field. It was not even the first one to launch its service in the market. The Dailymotion frenchies, for example, were in the place a few months before the US company. Early in its development, Dailymotion had a slightly different approach insofar as they didn’t focus all their efforts on the UGC and they spent a lot of energy in developing partnerships with official content editors. However, this difference won’t be so true in the future as Youtube is significantly moving to this model. In 2008, Dailymotion generated a 12 million €  revenue. However, the company is not profitable yet.

In the following table, you will find a brief comparison of both sites based on technical aspects, main features and a few numbers.

Now that all these money concerns were took into account (no pun intended), what about musical instruments videos that is my main interest (and maybe yours too)?

These video sharing websites are:

• Generalists.
• Endowed with hyper-active communities
• Endowed with a gigantic traffic.

It is totally natural to find a rich and very diverse content there, including videos presenting musical instruments. In addition, most of the internauts easily chose these solutions because of their high visibility and the easy video submission process. The resource is virtually endless because you can find:

• Users generated videos.
• Professional videos.
• Videos produced by brands and musical instruments manufacturers.
• Retailers videos.

Usually, the internaut looking for demos of the musical instruments of interest will proceed following a simple and logic pattern:

• Collecting the information.
• Screening the information via his own criteria.
• Establishing a wish-list of the gear that will fit his expectations.
• Browsing through e-commerce websites or move to the local store.

The information collection by the user is probably the most limiting factor of the generalist video sharing sites. Indeed, the quantity of material there is virtually endless, but accessing the information is not as easy as it could be. At least, I think it could be optimized.

Naturally, because of the generalist status of these websites, the videos tagging process (keywords attribution) is totally free. They couldn’t easily implement an optimized and narrowed tagging system because they would have to allow too many categories and/or too many pre-existing keywords. Users could be discouraged to tag videos. Consequently, the search engine, as efficient as it is, can’t be optimized to dig the most relevant information. Some videos will not be found and some others will be mistakenly selected. The loss of relevance of search results is reinforced by the lack of editorial policy (proper to a generalist website). Therefore, potentially interesting videos could be forgotten while others won’t be listed in the search results.

I previously mentioned that the validity of the tests (video or written) relies on the redundancy of the information, from the users point of view obviously. The relevance of information is related to the number of different demos made by different users of the same model of musical instrument. The more tests there are, the more relevant the information will be. Because of their dominant position and because of the nature of UGC, redundancy is a fact on Youtube for example. However, the lack of editorial policy and moderation induce a variation of the videos quality ranging from high quality videos to rather poor videos. Don’t get me wrong, any video has an intrinsic value, not in financial terms but in terms of usefulness for the user who will view the video. However, there are some objective quality criteria than can be established regarding demos of musical instruments:

• The picture: Not the most important but you have to admit that a nice video presenting the instrument is more enjoyable.
• The sound: The most important because a video shot with a mobile phone will be less interesting than a video made with a clean sound recording (and the methods are diverse).
• The skills of the player: Double-edged criterion as some players will magnify any instrument. However, a few chords (on a guitar for example) are sometimes enough to get an idea of the overall tone of the instrument… No need to be Eddie Van Halen to do this.

All of this, contribute to generate a huge background noise that doesn’t prevent you from getting what you are looking for of course (if the content exists… duh!!). However, because of this background noise, the collection of information can be a little tedious.

The aggregation of the collected information is the last point that could be optimized, although I think it is a little bit hard (not impossible) to implement on a generalist website. Beyond aggregation sensu stricto, I mean the bridges that can be disposed between the content that the user will collect to establish his wish-list and more pragmatic informations related to the purchase process.

As I previously mentioned, Youtube and Dailymotion had slightly different approaches since the beginning. Youtube built its success on the UGC while Dailymotion was simultaneously advancing on UGC and professional content editors. In 2008, Youtube made a shift increasingly focusing on partnerships. Indeed, professional videos are supposed to be easier to monetize than UGC. About 58% of the videos on Youtube could be non-UGC content. I would guess that this is roughly the proportion that could be assessed in the field of musical instruments demos on this website, although I didn’t push the analysis of the content so far… yet?

In a next article I will talk about the challengers of both websites.

Sources:
http://www.youtube.com
http://www.dailymotion.com
http://www.blogtechguy.com
http://www.journaldunet.com
http://www.vnunet.fr
http://www.zelaurent.com
http://www.actu-video.fr
http://www.decideurstv.com

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