YouTube versus Facebook: where do you watch your videos?

Say online videos and most of us still think YouTube: since Google bought it in 2006 for $1.6 billion, the platform has become a global monster used by more than one billion people who upload an average of three hundred hours of video every single minute.

The figures are impressive and would lead one to believe that YouTube radically dominates a category that it pretty much invented: before it appeared, online videos were within the reach of a relatively geeky minority.

But YouTube seems to be headed into choppy waters. Sure, we now have youtubers, overnight stars whose videos are watched by millions of people, but this can’t hide a series of problems that by now will have the people at Google worried.

To start with, there’s the advertising model: Google’s idea of ads that seem to help users, such as relevant results carefully segmented that offer added value, doesn’t work with YouTube. Instead, its advertising is annoying, uncomfortable, and based on old fashioned pre-rolls that force users to watch something they don’t want to, or to endure bothersome banners that block part of the screen, and that oftentimes cannot even be removed because the advertisers place the banner suspiciously close to the top of the screen, so when the user tries to close it with his or her pointer, it triggers the scroll-down bar. If I were one of the founders of Google, somebody who believed that there had to be a better advertising model, and who had rejected traditional approaches and intrusive formats on its main page, I wouldn’t exactly be proud of YouTube.

That said, YouTube has produced some notable and surprising successes within what we might call the counter-culture, typically content usually of limited quality and added value, pretty disposable, but that Google has been able to effectively monetize.

But the really viral videos, those that have been watched more than a million times, those that really matter to advertisers and that make up a contents base that could probably be called conventional, but much more representative of the wider population, are not watched on YouTube. This type of content is dominated by Facebook, which has some spectacular viewing figures, particularly on mobile devices.

This is about brute force: if I am a platform where almost 1.5 billion people spend a significant amount of their time, using all sorts of devices, among them smartphones, then I have a lot more chance of becoming the leading content provider: the recommendation and diffusion algorithms that allow companies to design viral distribution systems on the basis of powerful segmentation systems, also have a role to play. Seen like this, it is perfectly logical that advertisers are beginning to prefer Facebook over YouTube for its video content, and illustrates how Facebook is on the right track to show the equivalent of two thirds of the total that YouTube will this year, two billion against three, with a comparable number of active monthly users.

To see YouTube, once a byword for online videos, being chased by Facebook, and preferred by the most profitable customers is something we’re not used to… but that may not be entirely down to Facebook’s own merits: it also says a lot about YouTube’s failings and inability to adapt. In the race for the one-million-plus videos, YouTube is not only being beaten by Facebook, but also by Vine, the six-second format created by its owners, Twitter.

YouTube is not evolving, except into an environment that is increasingly bothersome, with naff advertising that more and more people are blocking, and that is prompting growing numbers of advertisers to take their spots elsewhere. Not even YouTube’s search engine, developed by its owners who happen to own the most successful search engine in the history of mankind, is considered now to be the best or most up-to-date: if you want to look for video, you will probably have a better experience using the latest Microsoft development.

Has Google been careless with YouTube? After nine years, it may be that it has come about as far as it can, at least in its present format. It seems now to be little more than the outcome of a series of fortuitous events rather than the fruit of a strategic management process. As a case study in sector analysis, fascinating. But for YouTube and its foreseeable future, a cause for concern.

(En español, aquí)