Blogosphere, wake up and listen to Youtube – I want you in my hand
So Youtube wants to get into your tiny screen? I get that, they’€™re doing the right thing here, short clips is just about the only thing you can look at on a mobile phone. Advertising Age broke the story, originating from talk at the Digital Media Summit that apparently is happening now, or was at least. Who cares.
The problem is, of course, how they are going to make money showing you clips on your phone. I don’€™t doubt that Youtube Mobile could become a great hit, it’€™s perfect when you want to kill some time waiting for your bus or whatever. Chad Hurley said this, according to AdAge:
“It would be great to make the ad model work on a mobile device,” he said. “I haven’t seen that work.”
Now, if Youtube is planning a mobile launch, with problems like how to play videos on various phones and screens and such, where are the movement to get blogs to the phones?
Think about it. It sucks to read long articles on a small screen, but the average blog post is pretty short. Most blogs today use markup and templates that could translate fairly well to the phone, as well as your TV set for that matter. Podcasts already end up in people’€™s phones as MP3 files, but why not stream them from your blog? In the phone? It’€™s just as brilliant as Youtube Mobile, and while on that subject, hey, embed it!
Youtube could drive the blogosphere to the mobile phones with an embeddable mobile player. Now, that’€™s not so easy to do I’€™d reckon but it sure is possible. I remember looking at stamp sized crappy trailers on a then brand new N-gage that Nokia pushed into my hands at a press event. It totally sucked because it was a stamp, but that was crappy GSM ‘€“ this is the 3G era, or whatever you run where you live, the point is that we’€™ve got constant Internet connections to our mobile phones and the blogosphere isn’€™t using it.
Sure, there are obstacles, but they aren’€™t even that big. Alex King made a plugin for WordPress giving you a mobile version of your blog, and while that might not be exactly what I’€™m after ‘€“ it looks pretty dull and people don’€™t like dull ‘€“ it sure is proof that this is more than possible to achieve.
Now, what we need to sort out is how to make money with this. Google, I know that you’€™ll crank out some sort of revenue method if people are using it, so why not Adsense Mobile? Contextual advertising get even more important when you don’€™t have tens of thousands of pixels to fill with blinking crap.
Mr. Hurley is right on. The first one to make the ad model work in a mobile phone will get rich. We want our Internet and our blogosphere, our social media sites, link sharing hubs and stupid people doing stupid things movie clips on the go.
So if I get going, with my phone in hand, how about you do that too? Solve it. Go.
