What is this new Policy Shift?

Google recently announced that they are going to be eliminating a significant number of their privacy policies across their different services to make way for a single new privacy policy. This policy states that on March 1 of this year Google will begin integrating information from each of their different web services in order to develop a profile for each user. Google states that these profiles will be used to “tailor” search results and provide advertisements that each user will find more relevant. If you aren’t already worried about this policy, you should be.

Who Should Care and Why?

Just about everyone. Anyone who uses any form of Google web service (i.e. YouTube, Gmail, Google+, and Google’s search engine) and enjoys some level of privacy. The new policy becomes much more frightening in conjunction with the fourth privacy principle of the Google company philosophy:

People have different privacy concerns and needs. To best serve the full range of our users, Google strives to offer them meaningful and fine-grained choices over the use of their personal information. We believe personal information should not be held hostage and we are committed to building products that let users export their personal information to other services. We don’t sell users’ personal information.

This means that as of March 1, any online activity that you perform with some degree anonymity using one of Google’s services will be public knowledge that is associated with your name, your face, and your phone number. This should be particularly off-putting to android phone users whose real-time location, Google Wallet data, and much more will also be available.

The Take-Away Message?

So what can you do? Not much really. There’s no way to opt out of this debacle. If you plan on continuing to use Google’s web services, you’ll simply have to submit to these policies and the fact that all personal information you share or indicate with them being available to anyone who cares enough to know. Ultimately you’ll just need to reevaluate using Google’s services instead of their alternatives. Time to break out the pros & cons charts again!

If you’ve used YouTube recently, you’ve probably noticed that many of the videos on the site now feature subtitles or closed captioning. And, if you’re even more astute, you might have noticed a CC button that allows you to turn on closed captioning for just about any video on the site.

What’s going on here? Well, YouTube has introduced a new feature that lets people add a closed captioning file to their videos when they upload them to the site. For those videos that don’t have a CC file, they’re using speech to text technology to generate the subtitles. This technology is something that is being implemented by companies like Adobe in video editing software. Basically, it lets the computer do the work of figuring out what was said so that the user doesn’t have to type it all in.

To some, this might seem like an odd feature for YouTube to be adding. But we must remember that YouTube is owned by Google and Google specializes in search. Allowing the actual words in videos to be indexed means that YouTube can do a much better job of searching for particular videos and can, hopefully, create a better experience for its users using this method. In addition, it brings Google one step closer to indexing all the world’s information.

Want to read a little more? Check out ReelSEO’s article on YouTube’s speech to text technology.

In just 5 years, Youtube’s growth has been explosive and exponential. With over 2 billion views a day and users continually adding more videos, its growth does not appear to show signs of ceasing anytime soon. Despite this success, Youtube still has plenty of room for growth or improvement.

Specifically, Youtube fails to reach the online market of users viewing television shows and movies. Currently, Hulu dominates the American market of legal, free, online television shows. Hulu partners with NBC, Fox, and ABC to provide users full online television episodes. For a monthly fee, users can have access to even more episodes through “Hulu Plus.” Hulu also offers a small amount of free movies, but the legal online movie market is currently controlled by Netflix. For $7.99 a month, members have access to unlimited TV episodes and movies.

Is Youtube the only company with the potential to bring the viewing experiences and content of Youtube, Netflix, and Hulu together? Can they eliminate virtually all other online video competition by providing TV episodes and movies? I do not know how the logistics would work or whether there would be a membership fee, but as a consumer, I would love to have one site to visit for all of my music video, viral video, tv show, and movie needs. Obviously this would be an expensive expansion, and expansion often causes companies to lose focus on their original successful strategies. Nevertheless, Youtube should not immediately eliminate this massive opportunity.

Youtube is not even a competitor in providing television episodes online. Hulu provides programming from Fox, ABC, NBC, ABC Family and MTV networks.

YouTube. Everybody knows what it is and the all inclusiveness of it. You can watch any kind of video from commercials, to home videos, to parts of movies, and sports replays, to slideshows of stupid pictures that you thought was a video, and everything else of the millions of videos out there. 75% of online videos come from YouTube This accounts for 558 million hours of online video watching on a monthly basis. YouTube alone has over 258 million registered users, 50% of them visit weekly if not more (Wikipedia.com).

All of these videos include products from different companies, purposely or not, which act in a way as advertisements. There are videos that show how to use different products, how not to use them, and fun dangerous things you can do with them. Even though not the original purpose of the videos these act as advertisements for the products.

Along with the subtle advertising, just recently in between every few videos a paid advertisement is played. 15 to 20 seconds of an ad that could be played 500 million times around the world. By YouTube adding this to their website they gain lots of revenue, although annoying for users, we can get over a 15 second delay.

In addition to being an outlet for people to express their creativity, YouTube has made it possible for the normal (yet highly creative) folks of society to shine, and possibly become famous. You hear stories of YouTube videos that become viral hits with millions of hits and comments. Do people actually get job offers and or contracts to create other creative content? One would think so.

And think of how you could bring positive exposure to your small business with a unique, witty YouTube video? If even 10,000 people see a video of a product you offer and 1% go to your site to see it, that’s still 100 new customers! The marketing potential for an avenue like YouTube is still unexplored, and I think it will take some time before that becomes reality.

So how does one go about finding a killer YouTube video? The technique of ready, fire, aim seems to be the best. After all, if a video doesn’t do well, you can always try again (and hopefully better!). I’m not much of a YouTube guy thus far, but after seeing the potential I may soon be converting…

Let’s face it, everyone watches the Superbowl for the commercials. Sure the game is fun, but come post-Superbowl Monday people are talking about the advertisements instead of the big game. That’s why I think it’s exciting that Youtube has a channel dedicated to this year’s Superbowl commercials. Viewers can revisit their favorite ads or catch up on the commercials they missed; there is even an option to vote for your favorite commercial: check it out here.