Businesscharlene Videos

We dropped by the Forrester Research offices in Silicon Valley recently and spent time with Charlene Li, one of the industry's most influential and astute analysts of the Internet space. Charlene explained to us the landscape and spoke about the relative strengths of the YouTube, Yahoo! Video and Google Video models and what aspects of each will be valuable to the online video revolution. See this video on Beet.TV: http://www.beet.tv/2006/07/top_internet_an.html

We spoke with Internet superstar Charlene Li of Forrester Research. Shes been thinking a lot about the model of advertising surrounding online video; she predicts it will take many forms. Charlene says that YouTubes business model will inevitably become advertiser based, and she sees contests and sponsorships as a very promising area for the start-up. She thinks banner ads are not a particularly successful format for sites like YouTube, as people are watching videos, not the banners. She is keen on the success of the Diet Coke/Mentos viral video ad. Thats an example of adding short advertisement to the end of a clip, known as a post roll. .....Good reading here: For a great article on YouTube and its possibly looming copyrights problems, read Heather Greens piece in the August 7 issue of BusinessWeek. And check out one of the latest viral marketing videos to sweep the Web: a rap spoof of the preppy life, spotlighting Smirnoff's Hard Ice Tea. According to an article in the Cape Cod Times, the video has been viewed over 320,000 times on YouTube. See this video on Beet.TV: http://www.beet.tv/2006/08/online_video_ad.html

The Wall Street Journal (subscription) just (4:25 PM EDT) issued an alert stating that Google has acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. To understand the market dynamics of why this makes a lot of sense, get the download from Forrester's Charlene Li. She thinks YouTube has gotten it right in many ways, specifically as an advertising platform. She says that YouTube has created communities around clips -- a great enviroronment for contextual advertising. She outlines some of these points in a recent post. I spoke with Charlene about YouTube in Palo Alto in July. She explains why the YouTube business model works. See this video on Beet.TV: http://www.beet.tv/2006/10/wsj_alert_googl.html