Is The Death Of YouTube Comin?

The other day I was on the phone with one of the ShoeMoney System students who is about to launch his own fitness training product. He was putting together some promotional videos and wanted my feedback on them. The videos he made I thought were really good except for the background music. A quick long note about sales/info videos: When you are making a sales or informational video about your product you are really telling a story about it. You are trying to communicate all the major benefits of your product and why someone should buy it. This can be done through verbal narration or text on the screen. But, TV and movies have made our attention span to video very very short... and we need visuals and audio that help move the story a long. For instance you should never see the same angle in any video for more than 10 seconds. Pay attention the next time you see an informercial at 2am. Watch how much the camera angle changes. Watch how the music changes. These things help keep the viewers attention and keep them through the whole story. And that is an important piece. How important... I can tell you that 90% (NINETY PERCENT) of the people who finish my 11 minute sales video on the ShoeMoney System buy. And those numbers are not a fluke. So obviously my goal is getting more people to finish the video and I do that with changing camera angles/screenshots/pictures and music. BTW - Maybe if people are interested you can get David to post about how to get analytics from your videos on his tech talk tuesday column. It's pretty sweet stuff! But back to our original story. So as I am looking at my students video's about his physical training product I think he has done a really great job with everything BUT the background music. He was pretty aware of this too and asked if I had any suggestions. Immediately this one thing popped for me. I told him he should find something very similar to what cage fighting legend Wanderlei Silva walks out to the ring to. It starts off slow then gets super upbeat. Now most of you are just like him and are probably thinking who the hell is Wanderlei Silva and how could I possibly find this music. A quick google search for "Wanderlei Silva entrance music" gave us a YouTube Video of EXACTLY what I was talking about: => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-wCXgS_dYE What an incredible resource YouTube is. Google provides an amazing service that gives you free hosting in HD quality of all your videos AND allows you to monetize them through AdSense. And how much do we take it for granted? I use YouTube more as a multi media encyclopedia.

• Whenever I want to find a famous speech I search YouTube.
• Whenever I want to find a clip from my favorite movies I search YouTube.
• Whenever I want to find a song (music video) I search YouTube.

If a picture is worth a thousand words then a video is worth a million. YouTube is an unbelievably valuable resource to me... especially with the ShoeMoney System. It's 1 thing to walk one of our students through something over the phone... another to send them screenshots of what I am talking about. But its on a totally different level to take a screen capture with me talking and 1 click upload that to YouTube. YouTube is about to change as we know it. 3 years ago (March 12th, 2007) Viacom filed a lawsuit against YouTube which centers on Viacom's claim that Google's YouTube video-sharing site allowed users to upload more than 100,000 video clips from Viacom-owned networks and movie studios, including BET, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, and Paramount Pictures. Viacom's lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeks $1 billion in damages. The case is still going very strong and I am finding it pretty fascinating. A couple days ago it was admitted into evidence that Viacom actually sent employees to Kinkos and other locations to upload its own content to YouTube. Or in other words while Viacom’s lawyers were issuing takedown notices, their marketers were putting clips up on YouTube to promote Viacom movies and TV shows. Crazy huh? Also many documents were released that had internal conversations between YouTube's founders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim to which they not only talk about all the copy written but how they intentionally took a very long time in removing the content. If you feel really froggy you can download all of the released court documents here. So what does all this mean? Eventually a decision is going to be handed down on this case and it could come as early as this summer. No matter whose side the judge ends up on its going to be a landmark case and going to be cited endlessly in copyright cases forever. It's going to change YouTube forever. On one hand the judge could rule that even though the founders of YouTube knowingly violated copyright law they can not be held responsible. On the other they could decide they are guilty of copyright infringement (which I think is a more likely outcome), will award hundreds of millions if not the full 1 billion Viacom is seeking in damages. This will be the beginning of the end I am afraid for YouTube and services like it as EVERYONE AND THEIR BROTHER will now come out of the wood work with a lawsuit for content uploaded to YouTube. I remember 10 years ago a service I used to take for granted... it was called Napster and it was amazing. I just hope 10 years from now we are not talking about this great service we used to use called YouTube.