YouTube officials vying for more popularity

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YouTube officials vying for more popularity

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01 January,2010 11:05 pm

YouTube, the video site owned by Google, is about 10 times more popular than its nearest competitor. But Hunter Walk still thinks of it as an underdog.For Walk, director of product management at YouTube, the competition is not other Web sites: it's TV.Our average user spends 15 minutes a day on the site, he said. They spend about five hours in front of the television. People say, 'YouTube is so big,'' but I really see that we have a ways to go.To that end, Walk leads a team of about a dozen engineers, designers, and project managers who are fine-tuning YouTube to give its users what they want, even when the users aren't quite sure what that is. The goal is to get them to spend a few more minutes on the site every day. This is easier said than done. YouTube will not disclose the size of its video library, but the company has said that about 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. That is the equivalent of more than 100,000 full-length movies uploaded every week. With hundreds of millions of clips to choose from, the challenge that Walk's team faces is to figure out how to select the 5 or 10 or 20 that a user might enjoy most. The payoff could be large. Google executives have said YouTube is still losing money but is on a path to profitability. Getting users to spend more time on the site would help it get there faster by selling more advertising. It could also go a long way to extend its dominance, shoring up its position against sites like Hulu, which are attracting a growing number of users with full-length movies and television shows.And it could also help YouTube keep up with other competitors, including video search engines like Truveo and Blinkx, or sites like Clicker.com, which specializes in recommending professionally created videos online. After Blinkx added better analysis of the visual content of videos to its engine early this year, for example, the average number of clips watched by users jumped to nearly five, from 2.5, said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and chief executive of Blinkx. For YouTube, part of the challenge is in handling people's searches. In November, Americans typed some 3.8 billion search queries on YouTube, more than on any search engine other than Google, according to ComScore, a market researcher. While Google queries tend to be quite specific, users often come to YouTube with requests as vague as funny videos.