Or, as Ted Leonsis goes, so goes the world. Everybody's doing YouTube and (as he wrote, and we
covered last week), AOL's Ted Leonsis is one of them. In the Washington
Post [registration required], the YouTube phenomenon is reviewed and the writer notes that all the biggies are
launching video sharing sites of their own; we've got AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! all on the list as of last
count.
The concept - that users create their own videos and upload them - seems more of a play for a company
that doesn't already own lots of video-ready content (i.e., Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft) than one that does
(i.e., AOL). Video content is expensive for corporations to create, but very cheap for individuals.
But can
any of them match the success of the seemingly grass-roots upstart, YouTube (actually a heavily-venture-capitalized
firm founded by early employees of PayPal)? If even the execs at the would-be competition are lauding YouTube, I have
to wonder.
YouTube, I tube, we all tube?
Posted Apr 30th 2006 5:27PM by Sarah Gilbert
Filed under: Products and Services, Newspapers, Competitive Strategy, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Time Warner (TWX)
Tags: aol, aol leonsis, AolLeonsis, goog, google, leonsis, microsoft, msft, ted, ted leonsis, TedLeonsis, time warner, TimeWarner, twx, yahoo, yahoo!, yhoo, youtube
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