It's a hype machine. Youtube is a great concept for a site, but nothing really more then that. A site focussed entirely on streaming video. Great, they've been around for years in the form of sites like gametrailers.com and the like. I guess what they did was make it community focused, made flash players popular (great...I hate them), and made it so any idiot can let you in on what they're thinking without having to learn to type. This is the same as all the hype over blogs and the like. Nothing special but some people have embraced it and others hype it for that reason. When it comes down to it youtube is a very popular website and that's really it. It's no longer unique (well, as unique as it was), it's not very useful, and the fact that it exists has very little impact on the day to day life of the average person. Now people kill time at work watching vlogs instead of reading blogs. Does that compare to the car? Not at all. But it's a list based off of a small sample of people and it reflects their opinions. This is them. Youtube is hot right now, and this is what that leads to.
"The third revolution is a cultural one. Consumers are impatient with the mainstream media. The idea of a top-down culture, in which talking heads spoon-feed passive spectators ideas about what's happening in the world, is over. People want unfiltered video from Iraq, Lebanon and DarfurÑnot from journalists who visit there but from soldiers who fight there and people who live and die there."
This is where I think a lot of people are wrong about youtube and shit. This isn't a revolution, it's more or less a fad. Whereas 80% of what's on television is crap, 99% of what's on youtube is crap....it's just that it's served in tiny little pieces so you don't notice it as much. I'm sick of all this "youtube is going to kill Hollywood" and "mainstream media better adapt or it will die". I don't buy it. Adapt to what? Show people what they want? That's what mainstream entertainment does. It decides what people want to see based off of ratings, and then shows it to them. Low ratings = no show. The reason it sucks so much is so many idiots watch shitty shows (mid you, these are the same idiots who are the youtube power users.
How do you want it to adapt? just have hours and hours of whiny little bitches complaining about the entire world is against them? Or do you want it to embrace the online video 'revolution'? The second seems unlikely because every time you see a video by puff daddy or whoever on youtube there are like 100,000 comments ranging from "Get off here you rich motherfucker. This is meant for US!" to "go back to mainstream tv!!". Oh, I know, you want hollywood to start signing internet talent so people can get paid to whine and bitch. Ok...but where's the revenue stream come from?
Youtube isn't anything amazing. It's a sort of slick site that's easy to use where people can watch a ton of free videos privately and without ads. That's really all it is. No one really knows how it's buisness model works, or if they even had one. I'm sure google is using it as a test run for adsense expansions...like video ads, but we'll see. In the end Youtube is more of a marketing machine than an actual invention and as such doesn't really deserve any place on the list.
