The Addictive Nature of YouTube
by Michael HoffmanSunday, May 27th, 2007
We all know about YouTube and in our business we talk about YouTube a lot. It’s the 8 million pound gorilla in the online video world. And we have all seen video on YouTube. But if you haven’t had those addictive moments on YouTube you are not understanding its power. YouTube’s growth has been fueled in large part by the conversation it creates between videos. Make a video showing your guitar skills and someone will make a video showing you theirs. Make a video about your belief in God or your feeling about the Iraq war and you will get video answers, maybe dozens. And YouTube lines these videos up for you so that while one video might be two minutes long, you will spend a half-hour going from one to the other.
Virginia Heffernan from the New York Times did a nice write-up in today’s paper about this called The Many Tribes of YouTube. She gives some examples of popular micro-communities on YouTube and their often fascinating video conversations.
