Bridge collapse reveals YouTube realities

by Actual News Geezer | August 2, 2007 at 06:31 pm | 769 views | 2 comments

Russell Shaw is a writer and commentator for ZDNet, a leading tech mag, and you can take his comments for whatever they are worth.

But his musings about what the Minneapolis bridge collapse says about the YouTube phenomenon caught the attention of one of the more interesting blogs on the web - The Lede, a publication associated with the New York Times.

Shaw went to YouTube expecting to find that video of the bridge collapse would have shoved everything else to the side (at least for awhile) but to his surprise, he found that postings about The Usual Subjects - Oprah Winfrey, lonelygirl15, Faith Hill, and Whoopi Goldberg - hadn't budged an inch.

Shaw then came up with three possible reasons this is so. What do you think?

1. The increased licensed nature of YouTube is starting to have an effect on users who had reflexively gone their first for news video. They now go to news station websites first.

2. YouTube is far more a celebrity news cultural environment than a “standard news” (whatever that is) environment.

3. YouTube viewers want actual action. I have to think if a video of the actual collapse- which CNN held as an exclusive for some 12 hours before releasing it to other media outlets- had been up on YouTube, its most viewed rank would be much higher than tenth.

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ABC2 News

at 23:12 on August 2nd, 2007

good stuff:

Actual News Geezer, I like this story. It's good stuff.

ianivs

at 01:02 on August 3rd, 2007

The featured videos on the YouTube front page seem to be there because they are popular, they have a high rating or lots of views. That probably says a lot about what most YouTube users want to see.