YouTube has managed to stay relatively family friendly, but it's no trouble finding a bad neighborhood or two. And so we have Safety Mode, just rolled out to users. Most nanny filters turn out lame -- blocking things like the name "Dick." (Yep, saw that one ****'d elsewhere today.) YouTube passed the Dick test, so perhaps this censor system has … [Read more...]
Watch and win: YouTube’s cool redesign
YouTube has gone public with a redesign of its viewing page, a change that puts the focus back on the video being displayed, instead of a lot of ancillary crap. The re-do includes a dump of the useless 5-star rating system. Instead, it's thumbs-up, thumbs-down. Not many people like redesigns at first, but this one should be a crowd pleaser … [Read more...]
YouTube loses top content deal maker
YouTube's chief of content partnerships, Jordan Hoffner, is leaving after three years on the job. Hoffner helped YouTube get into the premium content game in some fashion, making deals with Disney/ABC and Time Warner, and setting up an internal movie "channel." Hoffner is off to Barry Diller's new multimedia production unit at IAC, joining Ben … [Read more...]
Warner Music artists dance back to YouTube
Warner Music videos are headed back to YouTube, but it's going to cost Google. Executives at the third-biggest music company said they would receive "a vast majority" of any ad revenues generated by videos from Warner artists. That includes Coldplay, Madonna, Green Day and a zillion catalog artists such as the Monkees, Joni Mitchell and the … [Read more...]
YouTube serves 10 bil videos in record month
About 161 million viewers watched online video during the month of August, the largest audience ever recorded, the ratings service ComScore reported. They churned up more than 25 billion video views over all, another record. Almost 40 percent of that traffic went to Google's YouTube, of course. The UGC site served up 10 billion videos during the … [Read more...]
