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The Place for Water Cooler Buzz: YouTube hits 100 million video views per day
A new video clip culture is forming and YouTube is the place for it. It's a place where everyone can be Darth Vader...and get seen doing it by anyone.
Dancing ninjas, girls fighting, cubicle life, college pranks...it's the modern version of America's Funniest Home Videos. Only its not on TV, it's found online -- the "new TV". 
All that is missing is Bob Saget (Tom Bergeron? hmmm, not as good).
SNL may broadcast spoofs of its comics as lettuce-biting hip hoppers or have Natalie Portman hip hop cursing up a storm for some bling...but they didn't become a water cooler hit until posted on YouTube.
As reported, "Internet video site YouTube just announced its users are now downloading more than 100 million videos per day."
It's one of the fastest Internet successes ever. It's gotten the attention of the world's leading portals like Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL. And it's one of the biggest media trend shifts of the last decade: the transition of "water cooler" buzz from TV and radio to the Internet. If you want online water cooler buzz right now, YouTube is the place to grab some viral video.
According to online traffic monitor Hitwise, YouTube is now the leading net video download site in the US, with 29% of the country's multimedia market.
29%!
The site specializes in short, home-made, comic videos but a growing number of pirated clips from mainstream broadcasters can be found also.
2.5 billion videos were watched on YouTube in June, the company said. Its videos account for 60% of all videos watched online in the US. In less than a year, YouTube attracts 20 million visitors to the site each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
Still, all is not completely well with YouTube...being popular can make you a target.
Regardless, it's where you find wacky stuff to pass along to your friends and colleagues. It's the place that inspires you to say "Hey, did ya see..." to start a conversation. That's something that used to be said after an episode from Seinfeld on TV. There's even people doing their best Seinfeld audition imitiations. Art imitating art imitating art.
Yes, you still get some next morning water cooler talk from shows like American Idol...but YouTube's content is actually hotter because it is more viral. The content just spreads and spreads as it gets passed along. How else to explain a bad David Hasselhoff music video getting more than a million hits in just three weeks? It's not for "America's Got Talent".
YouTube is the place for water cooler buzz...placing Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN, Google and AOL clearly behind. They each have only 3 to 5% of the video search market (MySpace, meanwhile, has 19%).
By the way, here's how YouTube and MySpace Video compare in video page views and usage.
posted by Unknown @ Tuesday, July 18, 2006,
