Magazine publishers with video ambitions see YouTube as safer bet than Facebook
digiday.com
digiday.com
The focus of Youtube is video whereas video is just another feature of FB. If I want to binge something in the background or watch AvE tear apart power tools (seriously, he's awesome) I go to Youtube. I've never gone to Facebook when I wanted to watch video content.
Youtube is a higher-quality video content site. It has lots of experience serving this type of content.
But as a social network, Youtube is gutter-quality, the worst of the worst. The kind of social network whose more disgruntled content providers are literally trying to murder the people running the site and whose comment section is infamous for being something like the most awful part of Internet.
I agree with the sentiment though, I remember during the 2016 election debates in the US, watching the YouTube live comments fill up with Unicode-art swasticas and depictions of people with turbans and bombs being shot at from behind a wall, and just incoherient expletives and slurs peppered in between.
They need to fix that philosophy, because it was their avoidance of manipulative end user tactics in the early stage that helped them win out over MySpace.
Today yes, but with FB's technical capabilities, I can't see why they couldn't knock off a respectable (if not superior in most respects, considering Google's apparent complete lack of skills or motivation in UI usability, and discoverability/search of all things) clone of YouTube in way under a year. And, they have a massive engaged social network to go with it, something Google can't bring to the table (they tried and failed). It could take them a long time to assemble critical mass of videos, but unless YouTube forbid it in their TOS (which I doubt, considering many people are openly advertising their steemit channels) most producers would clone their content to FB very quickly, especially smaller ones who are pissed off at demonetization.
FB's weak links in my estimation are the stubborn insistence to have everything under Facebook.com (rather than a sibling site), and the trust they've lost in the last year.
Probably because some aspects of computer science/website engineering are not entirely nailed down and years of experience still count for something.
They have WhatsApp and Instagram under different names.
I wonder if Facebook is treating Instagram like a second earth. If they ruin the first they still have a backup.
Facebook's challenge, IMHO, isn't technical, it's cultural. Namely: it's transparently selfish and seems to mostly act for it's short term advantage. It doesn't know how to share a pie. It doesn't seem to have a consistent strategy for people to build around.
> most producers would clone their content to FB very quickly, especially smaller ones who are pissed off at demonetization.
> and the trust they've lost in the last year.
Facebook let social games get out of hand, then it kneecapped all the social game makers.
Facebook kneecapped people who learned to depend on FB Pages to reach their audiences, to force them to buy ads.
Facebook just kneecapped video producers, probably worse than Youtube did. They kneecapped the news media as well.
If I was a video content producer, I wouldn't use a Facebook Youtube clone, even if it seemed better. I'd expect to get kneecapped, probably in the 2-3 year timeframe.
> If I was a video content producer, I wouldn't use a Facebook Youtube clone, even if it seemed better. I'd expect to get kneecapped, probably in the 2-3 year timeframe.
But unless any platform has an exclusivity clause, it's pretty risk free and largely effort free (a multi-platform deployment tool will emerge I'd think) for producers to publish to all platforms. Actually, if(!) platforms would cooperate, this would be nice because they could then differentiate on features.
That's true for me. I'm not on FB, and even publicly-accessible pages will throw up a "Please login" screen after a few seconds. So I see very little FB content. OTOH, I watch plenty of Youtube videos, and I can see, AFAICT, all of the non-paid content even when I'm not logged in.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/3/17317274/youtube-1-8-billi...
That's what you get when you are logged in in gmail at the same time. It's not like people WANT to log in on Youtube, it's just a side effect of a google account login on some other service.
Which for me is a big benefit when I'm not using a device that I own. I don't have to worry about logging in at all.
I think it's something a bit more general: Facebook is all about getting people to do, right now, what's good for Facebook, and it's willing to break things and get in your face to accomplish that.
Youtube, and Google generally, seem to be much more OK with just providing a consistent, approachable service; and letting the users use it naturally. In the long term, that seems like the better strategy because it doesn't burn trust like it grows on trees.
I long for simple websites that dont have auto playing videos that are always on some corner even when scrolled down.
Not sure if you can kill photos— but they're pretty essential to journalism.
Making a bad design, then overcoming the bad design with another piece of software is pure wastage of valuable resources.
It's really sad. UX design does not get the authority it deserves.
Edit: they have UX teams but they don’t leverage them because of a goofy allotment of any sanctioned development work to CAPEX which they never want to spend because they often have little of that but tons of OPEX. It drives the “just get it done” part of my mind crazy.
It was like using a microfiche while large boxes of whistles and bells were dropped on me from above.
So much effort to make a familiar, working UI feel clunky and uncomfortable.
but the scrolling is like reading library microfiche.
That left bar could use some work for sure though.
I haven’t heard anything about it since, but, then again, I don’t use Facebook.
There are all sorts of YouTube content creators who do everything for their channel, had no noteworthy background in any of it, and turn out several videos a week with broadcast TV levels of quality, in addition to holding down full time regular jobs.
You could spend several thousand per episode, but you no longer have* to.
I agree though, covering these now minimal costs with ad revenue is something else entirely.
You don’t have to if you know how to do the work. It’s like making apps. It’s cheap to make an app and get it on the App Store if you’re an app developer. But if you need to hire somebody, suddenly you’re looking at multiple tens of thousands of dollars, at a bare minimum. The fact that there are all sorts of content creators doing video work for themselves doesn’t mean that doing video work is somehow cheap. They’re just working for themselves on spec.
To me this seems like basic supply and demand in action, I'm curious which aspects of this scenario we disagree on to come to such a wide disagreement?
I suspect a toolchain could be created to essentially automate the process of making these videos, using stock photos/clips, an animation library, etc.
Where is the video equivalent to WordPress?
This is where companies like mux [0] come in the picture, but it's a paid product. YouTube is "free" with a chance to also generate, in some cases, pretty significant revenue stream.
[0] https://mux.com
Everything from between "Final Cut Pro" and "Web Browser" needs to be standardized with easy-to-use self-publishing capabilities.
(The CDN can take care of the bandwidth)
CDN is the tiniest part of the whole process. Each video has to be re-encoded based on the device and network capabilities. CDN can the deliver anything anywhere. Also good video player is needed. Even with HLJ.js and Video.js it's a lot of work to put all of this together in a very user friendly way. And then you want to have cross device support and more. Video is just hard.
I mean, Final Cut pro can export videos to Facebook and YouTube, but to export on your own media site is where everything starts to fall apart in terms of user experience.
Hosting your own video means you’re not likely to catch users who are binge watching videos, which I would imagine is a more lucrative demographic for ad dollars.
The world needs a WordPress for video.
Youtube for the longest time, ran on loss - until recently. Only after Google had reliable penetration all over the globe using their on-premise GGC (aka google CDN) solution, which relies on the user (ISP) bearing the cost of hosting the hardware and the bandwidth that run through it, that now Youtube has the infrastructure to make it profitable.
I don't honestly see youtube being seriously challenged. Yes, there might be pockets of competitions - but far far from a serious challenge.
Unless an individual producer has very high marketable demand that he can get a premium price from advertisers or charges users per video, I don't see how hosting videos for individuals is profitable. Corporations are a different story, and even they often rely on Youtube.
Whilst its not great to replace one big company with another, it is at least good to have an alternative to keep youtube from being too crazy.
That's __obviously__ not a good fit for FB. Nothing more. Nothing less. To say anything more means someone has an ax to grind.
Perhaps the title oft his article should be: "Full Disclosure; Google Paid Me to Write This"?
One is a social network. The other a media platform. The expectations and usage of each is different. Put another way...you host it on YT and market it on FB, __not__ the other way around.
For a brand to pick the best platform for their __particular__ content is not new and noteworthy. That is, it's not news. It's fluff. It's clickbait.