The secret of YouTube Streams

I didn’t “get” YouTube Streams when I first read about it the other day. I thought it looked like a cool lab project that might someday be interesting, but it wasn’t until today when I read Orli Yakuel’s post about it that I finally got the point. Her first sentence pretty much turns on the lightbulb: “Streams is a new feature from YouTube that allows you to create your own page from your favorites videos and share it with your friends and other users from YouTube.” Just ask yourself how many blogs you’ve seen that act as an aggregator for some genre of YouTube videos? Each one of those blogs is making money (usually through Google ads) off of finding and posting the best YouTube videos. It’s a perfectly acceptable way to make money, but with Streams, the party for video aggregators will be significantly trimmed down. YouTube has brilliantly made everyone a potential aggregator. They’ve streamlined and democratized the aggregation process, and in so doing they’ve hijacked the ad revenue that would usually flow straight to aggregators.