YOUTUBE

Yet another reason for traditional TV outlets to worry about their relevance: YouTube.com, the hot new outlet for people to post and share homemade videos, has caught the attention of big-name marketers.
Nike, Warner Bros., MTV2 and Dimension Films are among the firms seeding the site with commercial clips. Now, along with consumer-made videos of newborn babies, weddings and teens pulling pranks, is a short of soccer star Ronaldinho in his new Nike sneakers.

Part of YouTube's lure is its ease of use. Consumers — and advertisers — can upload clips quickly.

The site, which is like a virtual photo album that hosts millions of short videos, is simple to search.

As broadband penetration grows, and consumer appetite for on-demand entertainment swells, video-sharing sites such as YouTube are taking off. In December, when it formally launched, users watched 3 million videos daily. Now, it's about 40 million.

That buzz has piqued the interest of major marketers, ad agencies and media buying firms.

"From a brand standpoint, it's become another way to reach consumers," says Barry Lowenthal, president of ad buying company Media Kitchen.

In a world teeming with cynical consumers and ad-skipping devices such as TiVo, YouTube's edge is that its users actively seek out content. When word-of-mouth built about Nike's gritty Ronaldinho clip, consumers e-mailed the video to friends and embedded it in their profiles on social networking sites. It has been viewed more than 3 million times.

The price for Nike? Not much. The sneaker maker shot a digital video, then uploaded it for free.



(Petrecca, 2006)