Monday, August 03, 2009

News Near You

How do you make a company such as YouTube pay? Google have vexed on that question for some time but a report in The New York Times may point a way forward.

VidSF in San Francisco are a small video company who are producing a “Weekly Show” of local TV news. YouTube started ‘News Near You’ earlier this year and are now inviting over 25,000 news sources listed on Google News to become video suppliers and join the videos from ABC News, The Associated Press, Reuters and other. Also the man on the street with a mobile can now also supply breaking news footage as we have seen in many recent street disturbances around the world.

Around 200 news outlets have signed up to post news videos and split the revenue from the advertisements that appear with them. In addition, Google now show YouTube videos alongside news articles on result searches. However, is Google merely building the YouTube brand at the expense of others? Is it giving news companies wider reach? These are the questions asked of all such aggregator services and the answers are still unclear. If you send your news to Google you may get a wider audience and potentially more revenue but you don’t control anything and could be lost on the consumer’s radar.

The major news publishers, may be able to feed You Tube and also promote their own brand, but this is more likely to be the exception than the rule.

No comments: