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
If you’ve ever yearned to mash up your cat video with some C-SPAN footage but couldn’t figure out how, today’s your lucky day.
Because starting now, YouTube is giving users a choice over how they want to license their content. There’s still the standard YouTube license, which is fairly restrictive, and now there’s a new option: Creative Commons (with attribution). In short, you can now give other people permission to use your footage however they’d like, provided to include a link back to the source.
Licenses are tricky business (there are six different Creative Common licenses) but YouTube is hoping to reduce confusion by limiting users to one option, which requires attribution and does allow for content to be used for commercial purposes. → Read More
Online video is growing up, and so are the young video stars who first found an audience on YouTube like Fred (Lucas Cruikshank) and iJustine. Both are part of the Collective Digital Studio, a talent management company of sorts for Web video stars. Today, the Collective is announcing an exclusive distribution deal with Blip.tv on behalf of its video artists, who can opt into the deal. Other Collective video producers signing up with Blip.tv include The Annoying Orange and Freddie W.
The addition of the Collective’s videos to Blip.tv’s arsenal is significant. Blip.tv is currently serving about 300 million video views a month. The Web shows that the Collective is bringing to the table attract about 200 million views a month. There is some slight overlap, but Blip.tv CEO Michael Hudack expects the deal will help Blip cross the 500 million views per month line by the end of the year. → Read More
YouTube is now showing approximately 3 billion videos a day. A growing proportion of those are shown with ads—more than 2 billion a week—and YouTube as a business is expected to pass $1 billion in revenue next year.
But when it comes to making money, some videos do better than others. For YouTube, it is all about scale, and networks of loosely aligned online video producers scale better than individual shows and viral-video phenoms. In fact, there is a brand new department inside YouTube called Networks. The purpose of the department is encourage the formation of these outside networks which then use YouTube as their distribution channel. → Read More
YouTube is celebrating its sixth birthday this month, and the Google subsidiary is doing it partly by sharing some big numbers that underscore its overwhelming dominance in the online video streaming space.
YouTube says global daily views have gone up 50 percent in the past 12 months, which means they currently handle a whopping 3 billion views per day. Also worth noting: YouTube says it has exceeded over 48 hours of video uploaded to the site (which represents a 100 percent increase year over year). → Read More
A couple of days ago, we got a tip pointing us to a YouTube page with a bit of interesting information. On Google’s official account there was a placeholder page for a “Google Press Conference”. We we reached out to Google about this, they said they were checking into it, and the page immediately was taken down (but not before we snagged a screenshot, naturally). Weird.
Well, weird until the news broke on Bloomberg today that Google is planning to unveil a mobile payment service on Thursday. The announcement is expected to involve the NFC chips built into the Nexus S. → Read More
It was when they pulled out the machetes that I started to worry.
I’d seen men with machetes in Africa before, but they were rusty, practical tools used for clearing away brush by the side of the highway. These were long, shiny and housed in decorative sheaths, pulled out ostensibly so the men could sit down more comfortably, but done with a clear, understated flair. They were more like sultan swords than jungle tools.
The kicking in my six-month pregnant belly had gone eerily silent since we entered the vigilante court at Alaba. → Read More
Google confirmed the existence of its YouTube Movies service earlier today and has just released more details on which studios and movies will provide the 3,000 titles in its repertoire. YouTube has partnered up with Universal, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros and others to offer full length feature films on YouTube.com/movies. → Read More
YouTube chief Salar Kamangar has just written a post on the YouTube blog titled “Welcome to the future of video. Please stay a while” , in which he hints at some major announcements that will be coming later today. The gist of the post: users are now racking up 2 billion views on YouTube per day, but they’re spending just 15 minutes a day on YouTube — compared to five hours a day watching TV (seriously, you folks watch a lot of TV).
YouTube’s been on a mission to grab more of that TV-watching time for itself, with initiatives like YouTube Next, which helps train some of the site’s elite users on how to create compelling content. But historically you’ve always had to look elsewhere — like iTunes and Netflix —for big-name movies and premium content. Now it looks like that’s finally starting to change: YouTube is adding around 3,000 new movie titles to its rental section, including ‘blockbuster films’. From Kamangar’s post: → Read More
AVOS, the new company formed by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, has acquired Tap11, a real-time business intelligence platform. The company’s platform integrates social publishing and analytics into a single dashboard to allow marketers to monitor, engage, and measure the impact of their campaigns. According to the press release, Tap11 works with over 500 major brands, media companies, and agencies. The company had raised funding from US Venture Partners, Alloy Ventures and Palomar Ventures. The acquisition closely follows AVOS’ recent acquisition of social bookmarking service Delicious. → Read More
