YouTube has become the go-to source for video distribution and hosting, and, to date, the video giant has seen tens of millions of channels created, where users are uploading their video content in droves — by the second. Professional videographers, amateur smartphone camera operators, and everyone in between is taking advantage of the YouTube limelight, many of them through their channels. Of course, while these channels are a great place to store one’s cache of video, maybe you want to create your own independent video site to host your own videos — to take advantage of all those video optimization assets you can’t get from YouTube. → Read More
Google is shipping more Google+ features today designed to increase user engagement and sharing. These include a YouTube slider that lets you watch and share YouTube videos with your Google+ friends and two new Google Chrome extensions for sharing webpages and tracking your Google+ notifications. → Read More
In an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing today, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen reminisced about selling his company to Google. “Was there any way you could not have sold?” Sarah Lacy asked? Hindsight is 20/20 Chen replied.
Chen revealed that the entire $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition was completed in one week’s time. Chen met with executives from both Google and Yahoo, including Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, at a Denny’s in Palo Alto, “We didn’t want to meet at offices, so we were like, ‘Where’s a place that none of us would go?’”
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I love finding services that bring value to small businesses. Viewbix falls squarely into that category.
ViewBix comes from the founders of Qoof, who gave agencies and advertisers a way to easily create interactive videos. The need for customization, however, tended to bring a lot of friction to the selling process.
For SMBs, it was pretty much completely out of scope. This was frustrating for Qoof’s founders, who were noticing growing demand in that vertical. → Read More
We already know that YouTube is seeing 3 billion videos viewed per day day, but now the online video giant is now seeing a whopping 800 million people per month visiting the site, Google revealed in its third-quarter earnings report last week. And today, YouTube is also announcing the ability to sell merchandise, tickets and more via the site.
Through a feature called the Merch Store, YouTube partners will be able to sell artist merchandise, digital downloads, concert tickets and other experiences to fans and visitors. YouTube has partnered with a number of companies to launch these stores. Topspin is helping power merchandise sales, concert tickets and experiences; SongKick will help sell tickets for concerts; and iTunes and Amazon will power transactions for music downloads. → Read More
Google’s YouTube debuted an experimental music discovery project dubbed YouTube Disco last year in January, enabling users to create quick-and-dirty playlists and discover new artists and music videos on the fly.
Not that this is a really big deal or anything, but a reader informs us that the feature, which was launched rather quietly via YouTube test lab TestTube, recently stopped returning results even for queries like ‘Lady Gaga’, ‘Justin Bieber’ and ‘Madonna’. No more Finding, Mixing or Watching, folks. → Read More
When I was just a wee pupil, an excellent science fair project didn’t get you much. At best, you walked away with a blue ribbon and the satisfaction of knowing your paper mache volcano was better than your friends’. These days, a great science project can win you much more, like the opportunity to attend a rocket launch in Japan. Way cooler, yes?
Thanks to a partnership between Lenovo and YouTube, students from all over the globe will be able to submit an explanation of their experiments through YouTube for a chance to have those experiments conducted in space. The project is called Space Lab and it officially kicks off today. → Read More
YouTube today delivered its movie rental service to UK customers, making it the third country to gain access to the service. Both Canada and the U.S. have enjoyed YouTube movie rentals for a while now. At this point there’s plenty to choose from, with over 1,000 different titles ranging from blockbusters to indie films.
Each rental will last 48 hours, and cost between £2.49 (USD $3.87) to £3.49 (USD $5.42). Users can access their rented videos from any computer as long as they’re signed in to their YouTube account, along with Google TV, any Honeycomb-powered Android tablet and select Android smartphones. → Read More
I hate 3D videos. Chances are, you hate 3D videos too. And yet, the electronics makers of the world insist on shoving 3D display technology into everything from TVs to smartphones, regardless of the fact that there’s still next to no worthwhile 3D content out there. Besides Avatar — but seriously, I could barely make it through that movie without nodding off the first time.
But wherever video trends go, Youtube will follow. YouTube has been playing around with 3D video support for some time now, with the biggest holdback being that only a very, very small chunk of the population owns a camera capable of capturing that extra dimension. Looking to get more 3D content onto their site, YouTube is today rolling out a Beta of a 2D to 3D conversion system. They also removed the 15 minute video limit for all verified users. → Read More
As we announced last week, we’ve been busy securing some of the most exciting names in China for our Disrupt Beijing conference this October including Tencent Founder and CEO Pony Ma and Chinese entrepreneur and angel investor Lei Jun. But it wouldn’t be a TechCrunch event without bringing a little of that Silicon Valley magic too.
In selecting people to bring to China we wanted a mix of some people who are new to the country and others who have a long experience doing business there; people who are existing successes and those who have a fast-growing, tiger-by-the-tail right now. We also wanted a few people who could speak to the culture and whimsy that makes the Valley so unique. → Read More
Chris Dixon begins this episode of Founder Stories with DoubleClick and FindTheBest Co-founder Kevin O’Conner by telling O’Connor that “DoubleClick is probably the closest thing New York has to a PayPal.” Meaning the two companies share an aptitude for hiring employees that go on to start innovative businesses. Just as Paypal spawned Yelp, YouTube, and LinkedIn, DoubleClick spawned dozens of startups in New York City like Right Media.
With this in mind, Dixon asks O’Connor if he intentionally created an environment that encouraged innovation while at DoubleClick, before going on to ask O’Connor what he considers to be the defining characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. → Read More
One of the niftiest features of Google+ is its group videoconferencing app called Hangouts. Not only is the service free, with support for ten simultaneous users — it also attempts to negate the awkwardness that’s often associated with coordinating video calls by making the experience more casual and free-flowing (any of your friends can hop into and out of a Hangout at any point, provided you’ve shared it with them).
One of the app’s other neat features is its ability to play a YouTube video for all of your friends at the same time (and, of course, you can immediately talk about the video). This evening, YouTube’s rolled out a new option that makes it easier to jump into one of these video-sharing sessions: you can now initiate a Hangout directly from a YouTube video’s ‘Watch’ page (you’ll find the option under the ‘Share’ menu).
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You’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t think of YouTube as an Internet giant. After all, each viral hit is emblazoned with a big, bold counter racking up the millions — or tens of millions — of hits it’s received, and you could waste lifetimes clicking on an endless stream of cat videos if you wanted to.
But even then, it’s hard not to be taken aback by some of the statistics the site drops from time to time. Like the fact that it’s technically the Internet’s second biggest search engine, after Google proper. Or a new figure that it’s announcing for the first time: YouTube users are now uploading two hours of video every minute from mobile devices alone. And it gets over 200 million views a day from mobile devices.
A reasonable response to stats like these would be, “How?”
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Looking to turn yourself (or your show) into a YouTube star but don’t know where to begin? YouTube’s looking to help — the video portal has launched a comprehensive guide outlining how content producers should be approaching the platform and which features they can take advantage of. The 70 page guide has a fitting title: The Creator Playbook.
The new document was discussed today at the VidCon conference in Los Angeles, and is part of YouTube’s broader goal to help creators produce high quality content (YouTube’s recent acquisition Next New Networks is the driving force behind this mission). → Read More
I keep trying to watch this infamous video of Wendi Murdoch trying to defend her mogul husband Rupert Murdoch from a protestor’s pie attack at his testimony in front of British parliament yesterday but I keep getting distracted by this pesky YouTube ad (above).
Mind you I know nothing about how YouTube ads are targeted and even less about how exactly tagging these things works so I’m just hoping this specific juxtaposition is some kind of algorithm accident. Because, if otherwise, damn.
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YouTube has just unveiled an experimental new redesign called Project Panda, and it’s looking good. You can activate the redesign right here (and if you don’t like it, you can disable it from YouTube’s Test Tube control panel).
Some initial impressions: The new design makes significant changes to the way playlists are presented, moving them in some cases from a sidebar to a scrolling horizontal bar of thumbnails just beneath the video you’re watching (it reminds me a little of YouTube’s LeanBack). The video player now has a darker theme that looks more polished, and there’s a dark background behind the player that highlights the content you’re viewing. And channel pages look a lot nicer, with big, wide images for each video. → Read More
In 2008 Google’s President of the Americas operation Tim Armstrong (now CEO of our parent company AOL) was pushing hard to get some two dozen advertising processes integrated into a single streamlined system. That project was called Project Spaghetti, and YouTube, which had been acquired in 2006, was a particular problem.
The YouTube sales team, led by head of advertising sales Suzie Reider, was apparently less than thrilled with all the pressure Armstrong and Google were putting on them to get advertising products streamlined. They created this video, says the person who gave it to us, to blow off steam internally.
The video is below. → Read More
Movie trailers are among the most popular videos on YouTube. A typical movie trailer gets millions of views, but how many of those views are natural and who many are pushed as paid-for ads? Yes, movie trailers are all ads in a sense. But people seek them out just like any other 2-minute video. That is not what I am talking about.
The same movie trailers are also promoted through various means and shown as prerolls before other videos or via paid links and those views can also count towards the total. For instance, this trailer for the new Conan The Barbarian movie has been watched nearly 5.5 million times. If you click on the statistics right next to that number, you will see that 4.98 million of those views come from ads (see also below). → Read More
It’s Thursday, Thursday, and Rebecca Black’s memetastic “Friday” video is no longer available on YouTube, due to a copyright claim by Rebecca Black apparently. It’s not clear what exactly happened to the video, which at its height before the takedown had amassed 167,370,534 views off of the ARK Music Factory account.
Earlier this week it seemed like the video had been set up as a YouTube Rental by ARK, and then not so much. Is this latest drama due to an attempt by ARK to capitalize on the young star’s Internet fame? I have no idea. → Read More
Looking to kill some time? Check out the new feature just launched by YouTube, which they’re calling As Seen On.
The gist is simple: YouTube is crawling blogs and other websites to see which YouTube videos they’re linking to, and has compiled all of the linked videos into an easily-browsable list. You can find the TechCrunch version right here. → Read More
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