Apparently a number of companies, including Microsoft, have joined forces to create a competitive platform against YouTube. Not small companies : “the giant cooperative idea for a “new YouTube” put out there by NBC, NewsCorp, MSN, AOL and Yahoo.”
Emily Riley, analyst at Jupiter Research shared some news on her blog :
YouTube is Dead, Long Live NewCo
… By now, everyone has heard about the giant cooperative idea for a “new YouTube” put out there by NBC, NewsCorp, MSN, AOL and Yahoo. It sounds great; use legitimate video content on some of the most heavily trafficked sites on the web and sell major amounts of video ads against it, for the first time ever. Sure, those are big names, and they have great content, but some issues they will face in generating revenue trouble me. …
It looks like Advertising.com will be running the ad serving for the NewCo website. This might be the best possible choice. First, new-ishly acquired Lightningcast will be able to handle massive video ad serving already. Second, the sales team at Advertising.com is used to playing nice with publishers who already have an internal team in place. It does give AOL a pretty prominent role in the deal, and will actually give them a reason to drive traffic towards the new site, rather than keep it all on AOL.com.
