What do Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Dropbox and Skype have in common? Except for being ridiculously successful, they all enjoyed a strong viral effect that helped accelerate their growth.
How did they do that? Here’s the thing; most people assume that these companies grew by pure word of mouth. Well, that’s only half of the story. The other half is that they deliberately built viral features into their products that helped spread the word.
Let me explain.
While the company’s design doesn’t seem to have changed a whole lot, its services and capabilities sure have. Created by Stanford PhD students Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google officially launched Sept. 4, 1998. The interface was so simple because the founders didn’t know HTML and were looking for a quick design.
We already knew about YouTube’s redesign, which tech-savvy readers have been enabling for the past 10 days. As of now, however, the new YouTube is available to everyone.
Unlike parent company Google, which tends to roll out redesigns over a period of days, YouTube pressed the button and switched the homepage for every user worldwide at 4:30 p.m. ET Thursday.
So what’s the change all about? One word: channels. The world’s most popular online video service now sees itself as a descendent of cable TV, with millions of channels rather than hundreds — and it’s doing its darndest to encourage you to use it that way.
Word on the street is that YouTube has a slick new design. It’s a revamped homepage with some pretty tight Google+ social integration and content discovery features.
But if you’ve fired up your trusty Internet machine and the new YouTube hasn’t yet appeared for you, don’t fret. Our friends at The Verge have figured out an easy way (via Google+ user Mortiz Tolxdorff) to turn on the new features right the heck now.
YouTube and The Walt Disney Co. announced on Monday they are teaming up to produce an original video series and feature “family-friendly” Disney programming on the popular video-sharing site.
Disney Interactive and Google-owned YouTube said the programming will be available on Disney.com and on YouTube and the “complementary online video destinations” will launch in early 2012.
“Disney Interactive will produce and program the co-branded video destinations for both Disney.com and YouTube, providing a family-friendly experience for viewers across both platforms,” Disney and YouTube said.
The so-called PROTECT IP act, sequel to the much-criticized COICA, is under fire again as it enters the process of becoming law. We’ve talked about it on this blog before and no doubt the discussion will continue after it passes or is rejected, but it’s important at this critical moment that everyone concerned weigh in and make an unambiguous statement regarding the quality of this bill. So then: PROTECT IP is a lunatic proposal, penned by a dinosauric industry concerned solely with the preservation of its own profits. It will do nothing to curb piracy while at the same time eroding fundamental freedoms of the internet.
An interesting infographic from FreeMake calls out YouTube as the winner in a smackdown between online content and televisions. Does this mean watching shows could be more energy efficient?
The site states, “The golden age of TV is already long gone. Today all major TV services stream their content online and viewers have more power to choose from than ever. The death warrant of TV was signed with the emergence of the Internet, in particular with the flourishing of one company that was the embodiment of its destruction: YouTube.”
Today at The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Founder of Khan Academy, Salman Khan, took the stage to share a few quick stats on the growth of his online video education platform. For those unfamiliar, Khan Academy is, as John Batelle noted this afternoon, one of Bill Gates’ favorite educators.
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.
Google is taking aim at the cable industry by putting up $100 million to develop original content for dozens of new YouTube channels, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
YouTube hopes to roll out the new channels next year, according to the report, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The Web giant is near deals or has already reached agreements with skateboarder Tony Hawk and media companies Warner Bros. and News Corp.’s ShineReveille, the company that produces “The Office” and “Ugly Betty.” Other expected partners include FremantleMedia, BermanBraun, IAC’s Electus, Everyday Health, Iconic Entertainment, Anthony Zuiker, and DECA.
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