The thing I like most about traditional web search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN is that they ask very little of me as a content creator. All I have to do is make my web site easy for to crawl by their search engine spiders. The beauty of this is that it’s a fairly easy thing to do, and I don’t have to change a thing if additional search engines are launched. New search engines can index my site’s content and display results from my site without any additional work on my part.
Compare that to video search sites like YouTube, Google Video, Veoh, iFilm, etc. where each service expects me to upload my content to their servers. They expect me to upload content I’ve created to their servers so they can serve ads around it, use it to build online communities, and basically profit from my work. Doesn’t that seem strange?
Online video services should stop wasting their most valuable asset: their contributor’s time. Why should I spend hours logging in to dozens of online video sites, uploading the same video over and over again, then adding the same titles, descriptions and tags at each site? The redundancy involved is insane.
Of course, I’m not totally opposed to sharing my content on video sites since they have something I like: viewers. The problem I have is with how inefficient it is to contribute content to online video services today. If online video services are really interested in great content from busy people, they need to figure out a way to streamline the publishing process.
Here’s what I want from online video services interested in my content:
2. Video services should obey robots.txt protocols, giving content creators the ability to opt-out of content syndication with all or selected video services.
3. Video services that link to the original source rather than host content (example: iTunes podcasts) should look first for torrent versions of a file so creators of great content don’t become victims of their own success with skyrocketing bandwidth charges.
Until something like that exists, there is a great opportunity for a video uploading services that lets me upload content once then pushes it to all online video services. Additionally, if it provided a dashboard reporting views, downloads, favorites, comments, etc. on each video services, I’d be very very happy.
What do you think online video services could be doing better from a content creator’s perspective?
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