You Tube: reality is forcing its move towards quality content.

You Tube's one size fits all "democratic" openess to any and all video content, regardless of quality, is bumping up against reality and economics.

Fast Company expert blogger Steven Rosenbaum insightfully notes that "YouTube has created a clutter problem in web video simply a result of their stunning success. Today video volume uploaded to YouTube has grown tremendously. Today, estimates put You Tube hourly uploads at 48 hours per minute. The results is that video viewers, looking for quality or contextual content, are finding it harder and harder to get quality content."

Steven then poses the inevitable question:

"But where does that leave YouTube's legacy business of free, consumer, 'long tail' content? Can YouTube both monetize the high-value paid channels, and create reasonable economics around the increasly noisy user-generated uploaded content? While YouTube's server costs and distributed storage certainly don't cost them much, you have to believe that the continued growth of uploads, and the relatively flat value of that inventory has to make for a tough business case."

I believe this speaks as much to the production quality and relevance of most of the content on You Tube, as it does to the clear economics of the situation.

Hopefully this will engage serious business people who want to benefit from the power of online video, and understand that poorly produced user generated video content is really a counterintuitive way to promote their business! (Read the article)