Friday, September 30, 2011

YouTube: As an Integrative Part of Our Culture

“Largest worldwide video-sharing community”

I would like to research how YouTube has become an integrative part of our culture. More specifically how it benefits large companies to a single individual. The way we use YouTube’s is very unique. It can be used for business (major corporations, artist, advertisements, digital music videos, music labels, etc.) and pleasure (personal use, embarrassment, simply listening to your favorite song, finding/ uploading a funny videos to show friends and family etc.) I would like to look into how YouTube impacts the audiences as patrons of business, also how YouTube impacts the audiences as viewers of entertainment. In addition, I would like to touch on how YouTube is “free” according to Anderson’s theory. Lastly I want to talk about how YouTube is regulated, who regulates it? And what is being regulated?

Focusing on the business end of the research, I want to study how advertisements are “endless” on YouTube. Including advertisements posted on the site by the agencies as well as the advertisements that run before you watch a YouTube video. Are the agencies are actually benefiting from the YouTube advertisement? How much money is being spent vs. how much is being made. How does YouTube get paid? How many jobs have been created by YouTube if any?

In contrast, I want to look at how we the consumers use YouTube, to either get our name out there, entertainment and or post random videos. How do we benefit from posting these videos/ why do we want to post videos? Why do we want to watch homemade videos and post them on the internet for the world to see? Is our culture addicted to YouTube, if so why?

Generally speaking I do not know much about the history and the creation of YouTube an would like to explore this during my research. I am really excited to learn more about YouTube and how it has become the new craze!


Random thought: Maybe I can post a video and incorporate my experience into the data collection.

5 comments:

  1. This is a great topic, I hope in your research part of your focus is how YouTube presents our society with endless opportunity. I think that part of the appeal is that you can find anything you want on YouTube these days; its almost like an online encyclopedia for media. On the business side, it would be fascinating to look at what types of videos get taken down on YouTube. Its always a surprise when you can't find something on YouTube, so you could talk about a company's justification for pulling content that users have already submitted (like fans posting TV clips that get taken down) and whether this helps or hurts that type of media.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I really like your YouTube idea but I feel like you should narrow all of your ideas down to just one or two. For example, I would narrow the ideas you present in your first paragraph to just one or two so you can focus on just those subjects instead of a broad array of topics. That way, you can dive into those specific topics to put together a great project. I hope that makes sense.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Michelle, I find your topic really fascinating and like how you have broken it up into three different sections. When you look at the consumers perspective it may be interesting to talk about (similar to blogs) how it has allowed everyone the opportunity to become a singer or simply get their idea out into the public. Not that every video is a success but even the most unlikely videos seem to get watched.

    I am also very interested to see what you find about whether the advertisements are profitable because from personal experience I know I have never focused on either the ads on the side of the site or the ones shown before a video. Nice work, I look forward to hearing about what you find.

    ReplyDelete
  4. These are great questions to research, Michelle! I've never really thought about the business end of YouTube (especially not about their employees), so your research seems really unique and interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hey Michelle, I did some research during my internship on YouTube, here are a few articles that were pretty helpful:

    http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00400.x/full

    http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.3670

    http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/16/3/207.extract

    Hopefully these are somewhat helpful and best of luck!

    ReplyDelete