Viral Censorship

YouTube has signed a deal with American broadcaster NBC to put promotional clips of the network’s shows on its site.

This deal in itself is nothing remarkable – even if it does follow NBC’s rantings at YouTube to remove content from its service that ‘belonged’ to the network earlier this year.

Other brands have deals with YouTube and use its viral video distribution to promote events, services and products.

What is interesting is that as part of the deal YouTube will now remove, if asked, any NBC content uploaded onto the service that the network does not want to see out there.

YouTube is already very successful, allegedly has a bigger reach than MTV and has been hailed as the advertising medium of the future by Mark Tutssel, worldwide chief creative officer at the Leo Burnett ad agency.

It’s a shame that the viral nature of the service is now being influenced by the corporate giants. Yes remove offensive material, but editorial control on a viral site? That’s against what it stands for.

Speaking at the Cannes Advertising Festival Tutssel said that marketers must learn to let go of the control they think they have over their brand. Sadly YouTube has already given up control, but to the advertiser.

Making Friends

More social networking madness this week with the news that AOL is going to launch a MySpace-style social community Web site later this year.

The move is being taken as it looks to become an open content business and better compete against rivals MSN and Yahoo! and has been announced amidst a backdrop of speculation about who will buy AOL UK’s access business after it was put up for auction by its US owner earlier this month.

There is a rule in social networking called the rule of 150. It says that a genuine social network will not go above that level as it is the optimum level of contacts that people can deal with and also if you go above that number you start to deal with people who are not genuine and so the trust in the network breaks down.

Maybe there is a similar rule for the number of online social networks that can be launched in one territory. AOL UK’s late entry into the market leaves it with a lot to do to catch up with MySpace, Bebo, Faceparty and even Lunarstorm. How many social networks do we really need and how many can people really belong to and still use them in a meaningful way?

It may seem like a frivolous question, but these networks rely on advertising and advertisers will only want to pay for quality eyeballs, not just members who have signed in and never come back.

As for AOL, it needs to garner eyeballs quickly if it is going to remain as a content business in the UK once it sells of its connectivity division.

Read All About It - For Free

It's an interesting time in journalism at the moment with first The Guardian and then The Times saying that they want their journalists to write for the Web first and the newspaper second.

Also The Sun has launched a free classifieds Web site that is linked from its main online site in a bid to get more people to come to the portal.

A few years ago publishers were up in arms about content being given away for free online, now it seems that they are willingly giving it away instead of saving it for the pages of their esteemed publications.

What has changed? Simple – more people are online, more people are accessing news online and more people from oversees are accessing the pages of UK newspapers online.

Both the Guardian and The Times have a strong oversees readership online and that translates into better advertising revenues for them and so a fresh impetus to make their Web site content as good as possible. This comes at a time when newspaper readership is declining and beginning to harm print advertising revenues.

Does this mean that traditional newspapers are dead? Probably not yet, although I know quite a few people who don’t read as much offline as they used to, but there will always be a devoted offline following, the publishers will just have to use their brand more and rely on hard news stories less.

As for The Sun? It doesn’t really have a classifieds business anyway, so it is not harming itself, only sticking one in the eye to its competitors.

AOL UK the ISP, BT and BSkyB

AOL UK has put itself up for sale and is courting offers from interested parties.

BT and BSkyB are the two that have emerged in the press as leading the field and it promises to be another interesting twist in what is becoming an increasingly complicated UK broadband market.

AOL has decided that the impending price war between the ISPs – in their triple and quad play forms – is not its scene and is cashing in its UK business (which is thought to be profitable) as well as offloading its French and German operations.

I can’t see BT being allowed to buy out AOL as BT is top dog in the broadband market with 2.6m broadband customers and AOL is third with 2.2m customers, 1.3m of whom are broadband customers. So unless someone else comes in with a better offer Murdoch’s empire will roll on and BSkyB will become the third largest ISP in the UK.

The broadcaster is set to launch its full – and probably ‘free’ – broadband offering later this summer after buying Easynet for £211m last year and the addition of the AOL business would sit nicely with its satellite TV services, especially as other players such as BT move into on demand broadband TV services.

The consumer will probably win price-wise, but working out what is the best deal may become increasingly difficult when having to factor in mobile charges, broadband services, Pay TV services and fixed line services.

Communicationssupermarket.com won’t be far away I reckon.

Eye On The Ball

Everyone else is running World Cup stories, so I thought I would have one on my blog too.

The BBC has announced that it is going to show live footage on its Web site of all the games it is screening from the World Cup in Germnay this summer.

Am I the only one who thinks that this is a strange state of affairs?

In 2001 Yahoo! signed up as an official sponsor to: 'provide FIFA with its many services and innovations in the various Internet sectors, up to and including the 2006 FIFA World Cup™ in Germany'.

Yet despite this agreement it is the BBC that will be showing the games live online and not Yahoo!

There are a couple of questions here about the rights.

Firstly, has this situation come about as the online live rights for the World Cup are tied up with the broadcast package? - If so then why aren't ITV offering a similar service. Secondly, why the hell didn't Yahoo! have the foresight to insist that any games shown live online would be their domain.

New media is fast paced, but this seems like a real clanger, especially as neither the official FifaWorldCup Web site nor the Yahoo! portal will be showing games live.

If I were Yahoo! I would be asking some serious questions.