Content Creation and Discovery

I rarely go to youtube to discover something new, 19 times out of 20 I go to youtube because I am looking for something I already know / think will be there.  That last visit of 20 would be to check my subscriptions, if they are updated then I watch what they have uploaded.  As for how I come to discover these channels I subscribe to, well that's usually the result of one of those visits where I have gone looking for something, found it, then subscribed to the channel.

Youtube is not alone in my repertoire of web sites all of which I share this mentality with - i.e. I only visit when I know what I am looking for.  The reason I do this isn't because I don't like those sites, it's actually because I find it hard to discover anything worthwhile on those sites from visiting them alone.  Now don't get me wrong, you can land on youtube looking for something in particular then see a related video and 3 hours later you've watched a few dozen videos.  The problem with that is simply that, you need to have a starting point in order to have somewhere to go.

When was the last time you visit the Youtube homepage, looked at it and clicked a link from it?  For me it had genuinely been years, until Youtube designed their homepage shortly after the launch of Google+ to become akin to Facebook's news feed.  This is one area of strength I find social networks have, and I believe is key to the success of a site - the ability to arrive looking for nothing in particular and stay because of what you find.  Traditional media such as the Radio and Television have mastered this ability long ago.  We sit down we switch the TV on we channel hop, we see something that catches our eye and we watch.

All of this I have mentioned before, but what I have come to understand, is that many of the major websites online that gather the highest numbers of frequent visitors, provide little content of their own.  Facebook, Twitter and I guess in its current form Youtube as well, together with Google+ and the myriad of social networking sites, all simply facilitate content, they don't create it.  Other than the site design these platforms do very little that is truly of their own design.  Add to these sites those that provide services such as News sites and the number of major websites covered by this umbrella of third party content rises.  News sites are arguably covered here as News is not necessarily "original content", it may be written by a journalist working for that company but the actual story is about something that's often in direct response to events that have happened, in other words this content is not brought about by design or creativity of the sites themselves - they don't make up the news [well, unless you're FOX News].

So what does that tell you about the Internet?  A place that is supposedly powered by the people and heralded as the last bastion of freedom of expression.  A world that supposedly escapes corporate monopolies and consumerism yet at the heart of it the most popular websites online today are sites that built an infrastructure, a means to an end then as soon as possible used other people to do all the work.  Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter etc although heralded as community powered are essentially businesses that employ millions of workers paying them nothing in return.  What is facebook without its users contributing the sheer mass of content?  What is Youtube without the millions of users that upload over 35 hours of footage every minute?