Is Youtube doomed?  Hardly.  Let me air out a major disclosure and bias: Youtube is one of our biggest distribution partners, they have played a large role in helping us reach 50,000,000 all-time streams, a feat few video producers - be it new media or traditional studio - have accomplished.

This being said: LEAVE YOUTUBE ALONE!

We’re all so ungrateful here.

- As consumers, we love having a repository of media content available on demand.  Youtube is Napster on steroids, a candy store with no end in sight.

- As content owners, we’re both impressed and in awe of its staggering size.  Youtube featured one of our videos on their main page and it generated 1M streams in 24 hours.  This is the only clip - amongst 4,100 published on WatchMojo.com and nearly 2,900 on YouTube - that has hit 1M streams, by the way.

- As onlookers, we have to be impressed that Google is willing to foot both the hosting and legal fees associated with it.

Ultimately, though,

- as analysts, are we not going to learn from history?  Didn’t those who give up and throw in the towel (AltaVista, MSFT, Yahoo!, Disney’s Infoseek, Excite, MSFT again) pay the price?

Much the same way that a search query monetized and paved the way for riches, the same will happen with video views.  Don’t get me wrong, for years now I have blasted YouTube in private and public settings (though always respecting our NDA), but the point is, Youtube is so part of the solution, and it is going in the right direction (notice they don’t exactly feature Chris Crocker, for example, and make way for premium or super premium content).

Just give it time.

Mark my words… and in the meantime, leave YouTube alone!

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