Okay. This is turning into Flake Week for me. Sorry. Coming up soon: more audio (a reading from Slow River), another roundup of search terms, and what I think is a pretty interesting question about oppression and lesbian characters.
But that's later this week. Right now I'm pretty much buried in Hild world. As a peace offering, here's a post I'd planned for last week that got bumped for something else.
This is pretty interesting:
YouTube, the leading online video community that allows people to discover, watch and share originally created videos, today announced a collaboration with iTunes and Amazon.com that offers the YouTube community direct access to buy and download music, games, and other products with a few clicks of a mouse. This is a first step to building a broader eCommerce platform for content partners and users on YouTube.
The YouTube eCommerce Platform will be rolled out on a larger scale over the coming months to allow partners across all industries including music, film, TV, and publishing to generate additional revenue from their content beyond the advertising we serve against their videos. Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos with a single click, now users can click-to-buy products -- like songs, books and movies -- related to the content they're watching on the site.
"YouTube content partners now have the ability to promote and monetize their content in a new and exciting way and create a deeper distribution channel for their content online," said Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO, YouTube. "Our goal is to improve the overall YouTube experience by connecting consumers with relevant information and entertaining content. The addition of retail links will enhance the viewing experience and allow people to engage more deeply with the content they want to consume."
In the short term, this is excellent news for all those vidders out there (hey, Karina!). In the long term it's a little more problematic. Apple and Amazon are strengthening their market position, which means their control--which means the mainstream consumer may end up with less variety to choose from. The next couple of years will be interesting. As always :)
