Wide Area News
Down the tube
by Russell Brown
The launch of New Zealand’s YouTube gateway has been slapdash and mystifying.
In theory, the recent launch of New Zealand’s own gateway into YouTube was the latest step in a sweeping strategy of regionalisation that began in June with the roll-out of local-language YouTube sites (Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK), with the aim of developing YouTube’s cultural and commercial relevance outside the US.
That’s the theory. The reality was cursory, slapdash and mystifying.
I didn’t attend the YouTube New Zealand launch in Auckland (neither I nor the Listener could find any record of an invitation), but I managed to locate international product manager Luis Garcia, who told me that youtube.co.nz was “adding a lens to the global YouTube content whereby local content can actually be promoted and made available to people who are interested in country content”.
And how exactly is the featured content selected?
“We have what’s called a community manager. And that role is a person who really is in touch with the content community and is always canvassing both the site as well as activity generally in the marketplace, has his or her finger on the pulse if you will, to see what’s being created, what’s of interest to users, what videos are actually getting some traction.
“And based on that, that person will actually go and manually programme the content in the featured videos section of the page. And that content gets updated very regularly as different videos come online, or get traction, or the topics of interest sort of change and evolve.”
Which is precisely what didn’t happen in the days following the launch. Wherever the community manager had his or her finger, it certainly wasn’t on the pulse.
For all the good, relevant New Zealand content on YouTube – short films, humour, sports and music clips, political videos – there is, at the time of writing, little or nothing to be seen on the New Zealand home page. Its featured clips consist largely of the same collection of banal teenage videoblogs, along with mystifying inclusions from Australia and the US, that appeared on launch day.
Rather than being selected by someone who is “really in touch”, the featured clips appear to be the result of an automated text search for the terms “NZ” and “New Zealand” in the title or accompanying information for the video. Thus, a clip from a Canadian community series demonstrating the proper means of baking brownies has been featured because, deep in her profile, the uploader lists her hometown as “the Coromandel, New Zealand”.
While this same collection of boring and/or irrelevant clips sits unchanged on the home page, a rather large domestic news story has been unfolding. And the lively “citizen media” group infonews.co.nz has been busily uploading precisely the kind of content on which YouTube has made its name – exclusive video of protests around the biggest domestic news story of the year: the police anti-terror raids. The same group has even posted clips of YouTube’s own New Zealand launch. None of it has been featured.
Bizarrely, the home page doesn’t even feature the content of the company’s reported key content partners, TVNZ and Tourism NZ.
The eventual aim of the regionalisation strategy is to give YouTube access to local advertising revenue in all the territories where it has a presence – and to turn its massive global reach into a sustainable business model. Through a revenue-sharing system, YouTube’s local content partners will even be able to sign up to earn a little money each time a clip is viewed.
Again, that’s the theory. Garcia was non-committal about when it might become a reality. But it would be safe to assume that there’s little danger of that until YouTube’s regional sites actually do what the press releases say.
Email: russb@dubwise.co.nz
