YouTube is really losing its edge

The other day all the buzz was about a segment John Stewart did regarding the Ames Straw Poll in which he pointed out that Ron Paul, despite coming in second, was completely ignored by mainstream media.

I always find Ron Paul news interesting so I went on YouTube to see the Stewart clip. What did I find? Two things...

There were at least three pages of 'spam' posts. These are videos that have the title relating to the topic, but when you click on the video there's either no video or it's a video of something else. A single user can post pages of spam so that to see the actual video you are looking for you have to search pages deep.

This spam tactic can be used by folks or organizations that want to surpress a video upon its initial releasing, knowing that people only really look at the first couple of pages of returns when searching and then give up.

Over time the actually legit videos start getting bumped up as their hit rates rank them higher in the returns. But for initial surpression this has become common place.
When I finally found a video for the Stewart segment it was on page four I believe and it wouldn't play. Instead the viewer simply showed the following:

This copyright issue is really starting to make YouTube suck. If they don't find a way of dealing with this they are going to start losing users.

Case in point, I went and Google searched for the Stewart clip (ironic that I have to use Google to find something that I can't find an a Google service - ie. YouTube).

I found the clip on a site called Dailymotion. They have all the features that YouTube has as well (as you can see by the fact that I've embedded the clip in this blog post right below).

Jon Stewart Defends Ron Paul & Exposes The... by SaveOurSovereignty

I don't know much about Dailymotion yet, but I'm going to start going there when I'm searching for a video in addition to YouTube.

That's bad news for YouTube. Just like MySpace fell off the face of the planet when Facebook came along, YouTube could very easily go from being king of the hill to completely irrelevant if people can't find videos on their site that they can find on other sites.

YouTube is still great when it comes to having your own YouTube channel, but the deterioration of YouTube in these other regards is something to watch. I predict that a few years down the road marketing and communications folks will have to manage multiple video sites to reach their audiences, they won't just able to create a YouTube channel and assume they are maximizing audience reach.

It may be premature to say, but the days where you could safely assume that 99 per cent of the viewing public was hanging out on YouTube may be coming to an end.

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