YouTube is Dead, Long Live NewCo

Emily Riley | March 27, 2007, 03:43 PM

By now, everyone has heard about the giant cooperative idea for a “new YouTube” put out there by NBC, NewsCorp, MSN, AOL and Yahoo. It sounds great; use legitimate video content on some of the most heavily trafficked sites on the web and sell major amounts of video ads against it, for the first time ever. Sure, those are big names, and they have great content, but some issues they will face in generating revenue trouble me.

- First, they are expecting to drive major traffic to a brand new, as yet un-named site. Even if the content producers are able to put together a huge, fun, easy-to-use site full of their own clips, isn’t most of that stuff already available somewhere on their current websites? In which case, wouldn’t they be cannibalizing the traffic on their own sites? New traffic coming away from YouTube might be possible, but those people aren’t used to preroll ads. David Card also points out that the portals won’t have the same incentive to drive traffic as the networks.

- They are making a brand new generalist sales team to fit right at the hub of the partnership. They can’t sell particular shows, but can sell categories of content across properties. Sounds like a lot of infighting, competition, and price undercutting is about to occur.

- Selling video spots across five mega-sites plus the new one ….I assume that there will be one video format, one trafficking group, one rate card, and one report at the end of the campaign? Anyone? Speaking of complexity, check out Joe’s report on the matter.

- Speaking of preroll, did I mention that people don’t like them? Especially in front of two minute clips?

That said, it is certainly about time that the media giants start tackling these issues. After all, they do own the content. And come to think of it, they also many more long-standing relationships with massive TV oriented brand advertisers than Google.