Five months after debut, YouTube a star
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By SARA KEHAULANI GOO / The Washington Post
WASHINGTON— The closest Terry Turner comes to Washington politics is his job as a bureaucrat at the Pentagon — until, that is, he fires up the camcorder pointed at a makeshift TV studio in his Arlington, Va., apartment.
It’s there that Turner, 45, brings his dreams of being a political commentator — the next Bill Maher, perhaps — one step closer to reality. Once a week, Turner uploads homemade video of his political rants to YouTube.com, hoping people will watch.
Turner is among a growing number of amateur videographers trying to tap into the mushrooming phenomenon called YouTube, a Web site that encourages users to “Broadcast Yourself” by posting short video clips to the Internet universe.
Though it debuted only five months ago, YouTube.com attracts 6 million visitors each day to watch two-minute video clips that amount to the Internet’s version of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” meets “American Idol.” Every day, users stock the site with 35,000 homemade videos of lip-syncing, dancing, silly animation and commentaries on any topic, all of which are commented on and rated by viewers.
Big corporations want in on the action, and giants such as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., AOL LLC and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN have launched video sites. But YouTube’s do-it-yourself popularity, fueled by word of mouth, catapulted the site past its bigger competitors in months. That success is drawing the attention of mainstream media.
“Marketers are already interested in looking at how to invest in it,” said Lucian James, president of Agenda Inc., a brand marketing firm. “It comes at a perfect time when brands are looking beyond the 30-second commercial and are looking for new ways to connect to their audience.”
YouTube has already launched a handful of budding online celebrities, such as David Lehre, a 21-year-old college student from Washington, Mich., a small town north of Detroit. Lehre and his friends edited and starred in a short film called “MySpace: The Movie.” In one scene, a young guy who agrees to go on a blind date with a woman he met on the popular social networking site finds out she is not as attractive as she presented herself online.
The short became an instant viral video hit and spread rapidly through e-mails and links. It helped push YouTube into the lexicon of Internet users, especially among the MySpace.com crowd.
Lehre now says he has a talent agent, an attorney and a pending deal with Fox to create a new comedy show that will compete with NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” A Fox spokesman said Lehre has had talks with its alternative programming division but would not comment on any pending deal.
In an interview, Lehre described a recent series of meetings with the heads of major TV and movie studios. “Every meeting I went into, they were pretty much scared of me,” Lehre said. “They were kind of looking to me for the answer. I’m hitting a market they’re not hitting anymore, and they’re looking for the next big thing.”
Lehre believes entertainment executives are looking to the way young people use the Internet to keep their businesses viable. “People connect with my movies because I’m just 21, and all my friends are 18, 19, 20,” Lehre said. “Kids our age want to see stuff that we make.”
Executives from MTVU, the network’s cable channel and Web site aimed at college students, said they are investing heavily in tapping online video, music and gaming. Lehre said an earlier deal with MTVU fell through, though the network says they are still in talks.
“We believe David is a really talented college student,” said MTVU spokesman Jason Rzepka. “His work would be right at home on MTVU.”
So far, Turner estimates his audience for “Watching Washington” on any given week is 35 to 120 people. Success, he said, will be reaching 10,000 to 20,000 viewers.
“This gives me a creative outlet. There is the possibility it will be economically viable someday, but I try not to focus on that too much,” Turner said. For now, it doesn’t seem to matter to him that not many are watching the video that takes him five hours a week to produce. “I don’t really have a life.”
YouTube grabbed public attention in January, when a user posted a clip from NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” in which two actors rap about “The Chronicles of Narnia” and cupcakes. It became one of the most viewed clips on the Web site. NBC claimed YouTube had violated copyright laws and demanded it remove the clip, and YouTube complied. But seeing its popularity, NBC quickly posted the same clip of “Lazy Sunday” on its Web site.
YouTube said it does not prescreen the content members upload. But if a company complains that content is copyrighted and asks for it to be removed, YouTube executives say, they investigate it and will remove it. Similarly, the company said it relies on alerts from users to self-police content. The company said objectionable material such as pornography gets removed quickly.
But these days, YouTube executives said they receive far more calls from TV networks, movie studios and record labels looking to partner with them than to complain about copyright infringement. The 25-employee firm founded by early employees of PayPal Inc., which runs an online payment service, survives mostly on $11.5 million in venture capital funding and revenue from text and banner ads.
“We’re really focused on democratizing the entertainment experience, so whether it’s a user-generated content from aspiring filmmakers or from one of the networks, the reality is it’s users who are in control,” marketing director Julie Supan said. “Our users decide what rises up.”
Commercially made videos are becoming more prominent. Last month, visitors to YouTube were greeted with a music video for the 1970s band Queen (of “We Will Rock You” fame) performing “Bohemian Rhapsody” and a behind-the-scenes movie on a music video for alternative rock band Flaming Lips. The site also recently featured a trailer for the new movie “Clerks II,” a sequel to the cult classic. In days, the “Clerks II” trailer had been viewed 223,000 times by YouTube’s members and 330 had posted comments, providing instant feedback to the Weinstein Co., which produced the film.
Supan said viewers are about to see a lot more promotional material on YouTube.
But users said they are wary of being courted too aggressively. “If I want to watch commercials, I can watch TV,” said James Sullivan, a YouTube user in Springfield, Va. He recently heard about the “Clerks II” clip on YouTube because he saw director Kevin Smith promoting it on his MySpace.com page. That kind of promotion is okay, Sullivan said, but he does not want to see, for example, a McDonald’s ad. “I would hope they are keeping to entertainment. People would be more put off by seeing a commercial,” he said.
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