We have all experienced the following message:

What is the real reason for this message to appear on so many occasions when trying to view YouTube videos, embedded or not? I have searched high and low and this is what I came up with:

16% say it’s the browser.
24% say it’s the country you are accessing YouTube from in regards to blocked content.
30% say it’s Google’s Web Accelerator (BS in my opinion)
30% say it’s YouTube’s way of getting users to visit the site.

Why then provided embedded links?

Personally, I know the problem is not with embedded Media as I have found this issue on YouTube_dot_com on numerous occasions, not even to mention embedded videos and the only solution to this problem seems patience… the patience to refresh the page up to 20 times in order for the video to “become available”!

Which raises my first question… what does “We’re sorry, this video is no longer available” mean as this is a complete misleading statement. Why not rather “We’re sorry, the video is unavailable, please try again later.

which brings me to my final Question… Has Google lost control of YouTube? Lets all be fair here, Youtube is not some small and easy operation to run as they receive millions of server requests daily.

They are the spoiled and adopted media child of one of many Google success stories, but is YouTube really that big of a success? Maybe a huge success to the founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, for Google inc. snapping up YouTube for $1.65 billion (ye that’s 1.65 Billion dollars… keywords “BILLION” + “DOLLARS”!!!!).

Many companies have tried and failed to emulate YouTube’s success at capturing an audience, but despite their undeniable popularity there’s one thing that Google has yet to accomplish. They haven’t made a single penny in profit!!

According to Forbes.com, YouTube’s Director of Content Partnerships (Jordan Hoffner) was brutally honest about obstacles to attract sponsorship for the Media Mogal @ the Supernova technology conference in New York.

He said “We’ve seen that because of the increased fragmentation of audiences, brand advertisers that we deal with - Coca-Cola, Proctor and Gamble, General Motors - feel like they’re missing something. They want to know how you reach a large number of people with a small amount of money.”

Maybe the larger issue is that Jordan Hoffner assumes a lack of understanding is at fault, rather than a flawed business model. Maybe a service like YouTube needs to be an add-on to another business in order to make money, who knows. Having an interesting product is great for attracting traffic, but not all traffic can drive revenue to make up for the $1.65 Billion acquisition.

As I’ve mentioned to Dave Duarte quite recently, most online Social Media and New Media companies has yet to figure out a way to monetize these awesome, high traffic sites with respect to privacy. The default is to run advertising and turn a profit.

In the case of YouTube they seem to be running into the perception that becoming more commercial means not being YouTube any more, and maybe that’s a fair criticism. If so, it means that in order to have advertising it needs to somehow blend into YouTube’s existing service instead of altering the service to include advertising. If anyone has figured out how to do that, they haven’t let YouTube in on it!

BWCOM sites like Blueworld and Zoopedup have used innovative ways to side step these issues; hence no one can argue the eccentric value and potential that high traffic sites have. Hopefully SA New Media sites like Zoopy and MyVideo will find creative ways to monetize and exploit these challenges that YouTube now faces and set a market trend for other New Media start-ups in South-Africa.

Please raise your oppinion on this…