YouTube is apparently worried that it's not successful enough. Even though...
Hunter Walk, the director of product management for the company, told the New York Times: "Our average user spends 15 minutes a day on the site. They spend five hours in front of the television. People say, 'YouTube is so big,' but I really see that we have a ways to go."
Yes, friends, that thing you call a life is still not media-heavy enough yet. You're consuming professionally produced video programming (including news, sporting events, reality shows, dramas, comedies and oh so many advertisements), but you will soon consume an equal number of indescribably weird videos produced by almost everyone - if Hunter Walk has anything to say about it.
And maybe that's a good thing. Nobody ever killed anybody while watching a video. (Well, probably that's not true, but it's a very rare occurrence.) If all the managers at Lehman Bros. and Citigroup had been watching cats flushing toilets and restaurant workers falling down holes, there never would have been a subprime mortgage crisis. I mean, would you rather earn $1 billion a year in bonus money or see a guy on a skateboard hit his head on a garden gnome? Dumb videos could have made our country financially secure.
Of course, not all the videos on YouTube are dumb. Some of them are professionally produced and look exactly like videos seen on television, because they are. But if YouTube just offered stuff you could see on TV, it probably would not be the most successful Web site in the history of everything (except Google, which owns YouTube, so there's a distinction without a difference).
Have you ever gotten an e-mail from a friend with a link to YouTube and then started browsing around looking for other videos by the same person or starring the same person or related to the first video in some way, and you suddenly looked up and it was 4 a.m. and you hadn't eaten anything since lunch? Yeah, me too. If YouTube really wants to rule the world and make "American Idol" an irrelevant cultural backwater, it needs to find a way of featuring those videos with narcotic qualities. Then it could sell advertisements and no one would mind.
The best YouTube videos, in my view, are the ones that combine such a peculiar mixture of attitudes and visuals that you can't figure out why they exist. You can't trace the idea for the video back to any human impulse that you recognize. You suspect that maybe aliens do really walk among us, and they are uploading like crazy.
My example today is a video review of "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" (tinyurl.com/yct5lug). Not everyone likes this video, I know that. It's sophomoric in places; even offensive, in the way that, say, young male comedians can be offensive. Also, it comes in seven segments and is about an hour long. It was produced by Red Letter Media, which is apparently just a guy named Mike in his home in Milwaukee.
Mike (I'm going to assume that every aspect of the video was created by Mike) assumes a weird, nasal monotone for delivering his critique. Certain asides suggest that Mike is, in his other life, a serial killer. Mike really hates "A Phantom Menace," and he explains why in tedious and yet interesting detail.
Perhaps it will not interest you. I am not an avid George Lucas fan, but I did see "The Phantom Menace" when it came out in 1999, and I pretty much agree with Mike that it is not a very good movie. But Mike's review (and the other offerings of Red Letter Media, which I skimmed) is just the sort of thing that could only appear on YouTube. Television would never broadcast it, even in the middle of the night on a channel with four digits.
But here's the thing: Mike is very smart about movies. He understands a lot about how they're made; he understands a lot about plot and characterization and narrative structure. The review gets more serious as it goes along. Plus it's funny. I guess it's sort of a niche video, but niches are all the rage just now.
So if you're the kind of idealized customer that Hunter Walk is envisioning, the one who will spend five hours a day on YouTube, you might want to give this a shot. And then, maybe: personal hygiene.
If you're going to YouTube, please tie a piece of string to your desk and hold tight to the other end.
Every time I try to destroy that clutch of scab-eating mouth-breathers, it only comes back stronger like some sexually ambiguous horror movie villain. Here I am, about to turn 30, and I've sacrificed everything, only to be shanghaied by the bi-curious machinations of a cabal of doughy misshapen teens. Am I missing something, jcarroll@sfchronicle.com?
This article appeared on page E - 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Comments