Impact: Fourteen months after it
was acquired by Google, the seminal video sharing
website Chen and Hurley started in February 2005 is more relevant than ever,
its unique users and page views spiking 83% and 200% respectively from
September 2006 to September 2007.
Buoyed by its new parent's resources -- which allow its videos to be posted
high within Google search results, for example -- YouTube remains far and away the most vital brand in an
ever-more competitive online video programming business that it itself created.
The heated election season should provide further opportunities for growth
and media legitimacy, with the YouTube-CNN
presidential debates promising to open up entirely new audience demos for the
site.
POV: "Google didn't acquire YouTube just to stuff the brand -- the brand was a lot of
what they bought," says Josh Bernoff, VP and
principal analyst for Forrester Research. "The fundamental features of YouTube that made it popular are still there: extreme ease
of use, social networking features like commenting and channels, and to the
extent they can get away with it, a laissez-faire attitude toward
copyright."
Read the full article at:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117978507.html