If You Were Deep In Second Place In Online Video

Would you create a poor imitation of youtube?



Or would you differentiate by offering professional and near-professional quality video?



Or would you let people go all web 2.0 and let people re-cut their videos (and other people's videos).



Or would you propogate video to all the individual properties that you've already built up-- a decentralized model.



All of the above examples are existing Yahoo! approaches to videos (less flickr, for which video is said to be imminent). That's a lot of approaches.

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Well, you'd probably do a bit of all of these on a common platform.

Certainly, you'd shoot for #1 not by copying youtube. Yahoo needs to innovate by thinking about content, personalization, monetization and distribution, several of which Yahoo! knows how to do pretty well (read: better than Google) when the executives get out of the way.

So here's some ways to do it:

1. Plug video into your premier properties. Don't *just* let customers embed videos in their sites, but surprise them with personalized feeds. Surprise them with really high quality content. Good candidates: Flickr, Yahoo! (local) News, Yahoo! Communities, Yahoo.com, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Entertainment, etc.

2. Make the content great. Go premuim with content from the big guys (like NBC-Fox-Hulu) and solicit user contributors too. Promise *big* distribution on Yahoo! entertainment for the unique voices out there doing great celebrity journalism in their high-school video studios, for example.

3. Make money off video and share it. Modest amounts of advertising are fine if the content is premium. Share the ad revenue with the publishers of the video and the people who are distributing it for you (say, they guy that puts video in his Yahoo! group).

4. Remix. Yahoo's jumpcut acquisition was facinating, but it still hasn't yet been integrated into all the other Yahoo! Video offerings. Wouldn't you want to be able to remix a CNN story about Scooter Libbey, for example?

Where do these recommendations leave video.yahoo.com? Probably just as a place to drive the other tactics.