It may be too early to tell whether YouTube is a billion-dollar business or a dot-com bomb. In the meantime, every media mogul worth his salt wants some of its viral video glow--or at least some of the next overnight Web sensation.
“We would look for the next YouTube--the next great idea that’s not spread across the world,” CBS
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The new conventional wisdom says that Web sites that let users submit and share content are a sure bet: Market research firm Instat predicts that Web surfers will view user-submitted content 65 billions time a year by 2010. But the Web is already glutted with basic video and photo sharing sites, and figuring out which of those will pan out is pretty much pure guesswork at this point--YouTube grew up virtually overnight, just as News Corp.'s
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In Pictures: The Next YouTube?
In order to grab a piece of the free content business, big media companies interested in competing must either acquire a tool that spices up an otherwise bland sharing site, or else invest in a site that tackles content sharing from a new angle.
The video feeding frenzy has already begun. A few notable morsels: Time Warner's
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Jason Zajac, Yahoo! president of social media, believes virtually all media companies will have to add extra services to their media sharing offerings. “As people start to understand the value here, you’ll see big companies really focusing on the creator and publisher class,” Zajac says. That’s why Yahoo! snapped up JumpCut--an otherwise ordinary video-sharing site that has a unique set of features for editing and remixing videos online.
Other startups make similar twists on established ideas. Photo-sharing sites like Photobucket and ImageShack, and teen social-networking site Piczo sound run-of-the-mill, but they’ve practically solved the security issues plaguing many popular, open sharing sites. Use these services, and nobody will stumble across or seek out your photos online without your blessing. Better yet, services like AllPeers and Pando let you bypass the posting of your creations to the Web altogether, allowing you to share files with friends and family using e-mail or a Web browser.
Other companies have figured out ways to turn those ephemeral and forgotten uploaded files into easy-to-make objets d’art--either b
