Viacom out of touch with Web 2.0

Stan Beer
Sunday, 21 October 2007 12:54

Opinion and Analysis

Listening to the anti-Google and YouTube rhetoric spewing out of the mouth of Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman one has to wonder why he bothered to show up to the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week.  Like the management of many traditional content providers, Mr Dauman obviously does not understand the mindset or the wants and needs of today's Web users and for the company that could be dangerous.

A quick perusal of the blogosphere should be enough to provide anyone, including the Viacom boss, the true nature of reality concerning the distribution of content over the Web. Every time a story about Viacom's $1 billion copyright lawsuit against YouTube appears, myriads of comments flow from grass roots posters in effect telling Viacom to get over it.

If that's not sufficient evidence, a visit to the Alexa.com site or any web analytics firm will reveal the popularity of Web 2.0 sites. YouTube is the number 4 most trafficked site on the Web, MySpace is  number 6, Facebook is number 7, Orkut, Wikipedia and social networking site Hi5 fill out the top 10.
All are Web 2.0 sites that allow users to post material and YouTube, the video aggregation and posting site, is the leader of the pack.

From a public relations standpoint, Viacom is actually doing itself damage by attacking two of the Web's most popular brands in Google and its subsidiary YouTube. The fact is, what YouTube provides is what people want and instead of fighting Google in an effort to withhold content from consumers, Viacom could be working with it to better distribute and promote its content and in the process making money.

However, from Mr Dauman's comments at Web 2.0, it appears, like other content providers, Viacom still lives in a world of denial. The company choosess to believe that consumers would prefer to trawl the sites of a raft of individual content providers rather than perform a simple search from one convenient location like YouTube. Obviously, the message of how the Web works these days hasn't filtered through.

And talking of filtering, Viacom would naturally prefer to gang up on YouTube with other content providers and force YouTube to accept their content filtering system instead of implementing its own.

One could imagine a content provider imposed filtering system hindering YouTube users from putting up innocent content that contains even the hint of copyrighted material, slowing down the posting process. Is it any wonder that Google foe Microsoft is also part of this consortium of content providers? Is it any wonder that Google wants no part of it and intends instead to provide its own content filtering system?

According to Mr Dauman, Viacom's primary objective is in following consumers and distributing its content. If this is indeed the case, then perhaps the company should get a clue and consider working with instead of fighting the most popular content distribution site on the Web.