The World According to Youtube : Explaining the Rise of Online Participative Video

The success of companies such as Myspace and YouTube have focused attention on online companies that are quickly building their business model on participative media, leveraging a set of new social-based technologies, dubbed "Web 2.0". This article describes the quickly emerging social behavior of online user-generated video. Five clear findings stand out: a) Participative media is already widespread, even it is still biased socio-demographically in favor of young males; b) Participation is fostered mostly by the desire to fame, and to a lesser extent financial incentives; c) On top of those drivers, social network aspects stand as critical drivers of the growth of user-generated video; d) Online video users limit themselves to 2 to 3 sites; e) Users of online videos are keen to have a more comprehensive offering than UGC video alone- this includes conventional TV shows as well as premium content such as movies. Taking together, those findings lead to the conjecture that the market for online video will quickly evolve to a concentrated number of destination sites, aggregating all types of content