Video sharing on rise; novice filmmakers find bustling venue on Web

When people take photos and videos, they share them. It’s as much a part of human nature as breathing. And today, thanks to the Internet, a lot more sharing is going on.

Don’t believe it? Go to www.youtube.com, a site that lets folks upload videos. Type “Boulder Colorado” in the search box at the top, hit the search button and then look at the results. In late June, 172 videos popped up.

The first video, from a fellow named Jeff, showed a rottweiler named Boulder playing in a puddle in Evergreen. This interested three viewers. Another video of Boulder gnawing on a luggage cart at a hotel in Estes Park while four half-interested onlookers watched, garnered 411 views.

Perhaps Jeff is not the next Spielberg, but that’s not the point. There are plenty of novice filmmakers and musicians out there who may want to be discovered, but much of this, say insiders, is just about sharing with family and friends.

“We’re in a time of changing media,” says Tom Frey, executive director of the DaVinci Institute, a think tank in Louisville. “I call it ‘the confluence of influence.’ Today, it’s not just enough to get information, people want to create information.”

Evidently – a lot of information. Frey quoted figures from a recent study that found there are 4.5 million blog sites today. He then compared that number to other more traditional media: 20,800 podcasts, 18,000 magazines, 8,841 FM radio stations, 4,758 AM radio stations, 2,250 daily newspapers and 1,749 broadcast TV stations.
“The way these things generally play out is that you first have print, then audio, then video,” Frey says. “YouTube has just taken off like a rocket. It’s staggering.”

Staggering, too, is the number of videos viewed on YouTube – an estimated 35 million every day.

The Online Publishers Association reports that 24 percent of Internet users watch online videos once a week – 46 percent watch once a month. And 75 percent of those who watch videos regularly also watch online video ads, and 44 percent of those folks say they’ve visited an advertiser’s site and sometimes bought something.

Not surprisingly, these numbers are getting investors’ attention. In April, YouTube received $8 million in Series B funding from Sequoia Capital. And that’s in addition to an initial $3.5 million it received in Series A funding from Sequoia last November. YouTube has reported it will use the additional funds to continue the company’s rapid growth, expand sales and marketing efforts and to accelerate the build-out of its data centers.

“This is the birth of a new clip culture where the audience is in control more than ever,” says Chad Hurley, CEO and co-founder of YouTube.

Hurley says there is a community out there that’s “extremely passionate” about watching and sharing videos.
One Denver-based company is capitalizing on all that passion. It’s called Photobucket, which lets folks publish and share both photos and videos that can be directly linked from Photobucket to any site, including popular sites such as MySpace and eBay.

Every day, about 4 million new images land in Photobucket, which is free (it makes money posting ads) and gives consumers up to a gigabyte of space – enough for about 10,000 videos and images. But it also offers – for $25 a year – five gigabytes. Photobucket won’t disclose financial information, but has reported that it is profitable.

According to Nielen/NetRatings, Photobucket had more users than virtual giant Yahoo! in April, 7.8 million to 7.7 million respectively.

Over the last year, more than 10 million visitors have gone to Photobucket per month -driven exclusively by word of mouth, according to the company.

So why is video spreading so fast?

“It’s easy to do,” Frey says. “Writing a blog is hard work, but anyone can aim a video camera and shoot what’s happening. That’s easy.”

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