Stop The YouTube Hating!
I love YouTube. It is the single best thing that has happened to the Net in the past several years. Nobody is going to convince me otherwise, no matter how hard they try. Calacanis won’t. Cuban won’t. Doug Morris won’t.
What all these YouTube haters don’t see is that it isn’t the "pirated content" that gets me to YouTube everyday. I can get that plenty of other places on the Net (bittorrent, limewire, pando). It isn’t the "free hosting" that gets me to YouTube everyday. I can get that at plenty of other places on the Net (revver, vimeo, bliptv, motionbox).
It’s the experience. The tools. The player. The comments. The community. That is the essence of YouTube. These guys invented the embeddable flash player. The single best move in the online video game to date. I love them and the service they’ve built and the community that exists there.
Bob Lefsetz captures all of that in this wonderful post where he takes it to Mark Cuban. And he uses this amazing YouTube video of John Lennon singing Ticket To Ride to make his point:
It’s not like this footage, and that of other performers all over
YouTube, was lost, it’s not like the owners didn’t know they had it.
They were just too lazy, or too preoccupied, to exploit it. THAT’S
what YouTube has done, shown there’s a MARKET!
Damn Straight Bob. Enjoy.
UPDATE: Saul Hansell has a story in today’s NY Times about YouTube where he covers some of these same issues and has a number of good quotes from Chad Hurley, Founder and CEO of YouTube.