David Emery Online

Same As It Ever Was

16 November 2014

I am on a bus. The air is clammy. Condensation drips down the windows. Directly in front of me two teenagers are watching a video on an oversized smartphone. The volume is loud – no headphones involved, obviously – and the track is terrible (it’ll probably place highly in the singles chart in the not too distant future). Across the aisle a man scowls in their general direction.

To my right is a girl far more sensitive to bus etiquette who has her headphones in, watching what appears to be the new Take That video. Judging by her face, she misses Jason too. Four seats forward is another pair of teenagers, girls, one headphone each watching something unidentifiable. Whatever it is, they seem to like it.

YouTube is everywhere.

More than potentially any other service, it has managed to become ubiquitous, used by the young and old, across varying demographics and classes. To wit; you could quite happily mangle the Warhol quote about everyone from the President to Liz Taylor to a bum on a street corner drinking Coke to refer to YouTube.

There are whole businesses and industries built on top of YouTube. They have their own lingo, acronyms, conferences. MCNs, ContentID, Youtubers. People have not only become famous through YouTube – anyone else forget that that’s where Justin Bieber came from? – but now people are famous on YouTube. YouTube isn’t the launching point to crossing over to other media, it is the end destination. There’s huge amounts of money to made – massive audiences to reach, and the corresponding sponsorships, ad revenue and the rest that then follows.

It is so big, so ubiquitous that the idea that it might lose that position is almost unthinkable. And yet, recently that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking about.

The relationship between the music industry and YouTube has always been a rocky one, to say the least. It’s gone from being something that was a non-revenue-generating necessary evil, to an interesting source of revenue, to now with the launch of Music Key a fully fledged licensed music service (although that last step certainly wasn’t easy to get to). Labels were practically forced to put their videos on the service in the beginning. Not only was that where the audience was, if they didn’t someone else probably would put it up for you anyway.

Music Key is interesting, because it’s one of the few genuine additions to the product that Google have made to YouTube since they bought it. But, like so much Google product development in the last few years – does anyone really want it? The key feature as I see it is offline caching, but while the casual userbase is using YouTube to listen and consume music, do they want to fill up their phones with videos as well? Or at least, do they want it so bad they’re going to pay £10/month?

This lack of consumer facing innovation – they have done a great job on the backend, revenue and ads side, it must be said – is what paints a less than rosy picture for its long term success. It’s not so much that there’s suddenly going to be an all singing, all dancing YouTube competitor that replicates all the functionality but somehow “better” that everyone flocks to. That’s just too hard – witness Google trying to do that with Google+ vs Facebook. No, it’s more a potential death by a thousand cuts, with different smaller services picking off niche (but still massive) chunks of the core audience until it no longer has the dominance it has now.

We’ve been here before, of course, on a smaller scale: witness the death of MySpace. There was no one site that killed off MySpace. Obviously Facebook dealt the lethal blow, so to speak, but a multitude of smaller sites picked off – and improved – key features like tour dates, music streaming and messaging.

Facebook is key in this discussion. Witness this article about how 40% of the views of the new John Lewis Christmas advert came from Facebook rather then YouTube. They have really started ramping up how native video performs in the news feed, which leads to staggering play counts that even YouTube would struggle matching. Facebook has the natural benefit of having an audience of similar massive scale to YouTube, and the power to be able to tweak their algorithm and just make native video work.

For music videos obviously there’s some hills to climb considering Facebook isn’t licensed in any way, let alone monetised. But the music industry has always had a weakness in chasing after audience, so little things like licensing will get resolved I’m sure. One of YouTube’s key strengths was that it’s practically the only place you can legally listen to music on demand without logging in, and Facebook with its vast userbase has practically the same setup. And can you imagine if Facebook started offering monetisation for videos, considering they already have a massively developed ad network? It would be huge.

A while back there was a rumour that Facebook was going to buy VEVO, which at the time sounded crazy as VEVO gets most of its audience from YouTube. Now though, I wonder…

There’s other potential areas to be chipped away at – it feels like there’s a gap for something interesting in mobile video, like Vine for example, and other competitors on the professional content front that could do something interesting (ad supported, no login Netflix anyone?).

The point is that YouTube was the first real video site on the Internet. It created the genre, the expectations, the audience. But now, as the area matures and competition increases it’s more or less the same as it ever was.

And “same as it ever was” is a pretty risky place to be.