Youtube is in Kenya. The company had a launch in a Nairobi hotel recently and gave us Youtube.co.ke.
This means a more personalized feel to the whole arrangement and possibly a few bucks too. YAAY J. *insert legendary cash register sound here*. There was pomp and glamour as we slowly get the hang of it all. Some media houses even got deals to have customized channels that would earn them revenue from running pre-video ads.
There’s a catch though.
Posting videos online just doesn’t cut it. Neither does producing any kind of content. The biggest idea is to produce meaningful content. This means producing stuff that people actually want to watch and share. Every media house now has a Youtube page to share videos of what they have been doing with themselves; kind of like a ‘we’ve got you covered’ sort of feel.
Unfortunately, we seem not to have gotten the hang of it yet. Sure we want to see what speech the President gave at yet another inauguration or swearing in; but not for a whole hour. There’s relevance, but ability to keep me glued lacks completely. The average human concentration span holds for about 5 minutes tops. Have something interesting and boost that to a full hour; that is if the content is interesting.
Get it clear – Routine is too boring. No-one wants to be involved.
Case in point: Share a link with me (and 3 quarters of the world) a video of a guy being lynched by an angry mob of midgets somewhere in the deep forests of the Phillipines and I shall quickly switch from His Excellency’s long speech to the more gruesome of the two. No offence, my mind just demands that I watch something more provocative.
Show me a video shot on a mobile phone with poor frame quality of an Al Shabaab insurgent being chased in Moyale full on with the Keffiyeh (read Arafat) don complete in brown timberland boots and desert storm units and I bet you it will have more views than a committee telling us how much more they will charge us for a litre of fuel, a cake of soap and a kilo of sugar.
Bottom line; if you want to capture an audience’s attention, keep it interesting. Keep adrenaline pumping. Give a sort of vague firsthand experience by making the first person feel as if they were there. Someone once said ‘content is king’. I’m not saying they are wrong, just that they probably should have added the word ‘interesting’ to that quote.
This is why Al Jazeera video crew will leave the tape rolling while escaping from a vehicle that has just been RPG’d using a mortar rocket or a rocket propelled grenade and have that all on record. Or better still, Charlie’s mum with her ‘Charlie bit my finger’ ordeal that is rumoured to have made her upwards of 150,000 USD beside millions of hits on Youtube.
Got an interesting video? Upload it, share a link and encourage comments on it. You might just be on Larry page’s Christmas list if you do it right.
