It didn’t take long before the press started to view Google’s purchase of YouTube as a negative for the site. Both The Dallas Morning News and the San Francisco chronicle ran stories this week about whether YouTube would still be considered cool now that it has been purchased by Google. Online commentators are also looking ahead at the sites that may take over the YouTube video crown.The most provocative story was certainly the one in the San Francisco Chronicle, which had the sub-title of “When the man comes knocking, you can bet the party stops rocking.” It would be difficult to peg a company with as positive brand and corporate culture as Google as “the man,” but the Chronicle makes the interesting point that those things almost don’t matter. It’s the fact that Google is a public company that does:
“But even when a giant corporation is filled with really cool people, they still must answer to stockholders and the threat of lawsuits ... The rapidly changing face of the Man is an interesting subject in the Internet Age. A few decades ago, the Man consisted of members of the police department, a few mean vice principals and maybe the Republican Party. Now, with so many jobless adults in their 20s who still live at home, the Man is pretty much anybody who pays taxes. And because that super-slacking demographic sets the cultural standards in this nation, anything that is championed by people with good jobs instantly becomes wack.”
So if YouTube is destined to lose its cool vibe among the young. What service is primed to be the “next YouTube?” There are plenty of possibilities, from MySpace Video to Yahoo. However, let’s accept the premise of the San Francisco Chronicle that the next big thing can’t be owned by a larger media company. Who, then, is next video darling? Media writer Steve Bryant picks Metacafe from amongst a plethora of choices, including Veoh, Revver, and Guba.
Metacafe certainly has momentum, with its CEO touting its place as a strong number two. As he told Bryant, “Metacafe is to YouTube like what Facebook is to MySpace.”
In the end, who the next cool video sharing site will be may end up being a moot point. With Grouper and Bolt already in the cross hairs of Universal, it is quite possible that the smaller video sharing sites will be taken out by legal action long before they have a chance to supplant YouTube.
