Lesson #2: Give Them Something They Cannot Get Anywhere Else

Have you ever wanted to see a specific re-run of “I Love Lucy” or “Gumby” that you have not seen since you were a teenager? Do you want to get your hands on the very first music video Michael Jackson ever filmed? Perhaps you want to watch the entire KISS movie “Phantom of the Park?” Whatever your interests, YouTube has the videos to match.

One of YouTube’s significant advantages, and why it succeeded where others did not, was because it was making available to the public popular but hard-to-find video clips. In its early days, clips from “Saturday Night Live” proved to be some of the most downloaded files from its site. Because users could upload any file they wanted, some of the most obscure and forgotten video clips were now coming back to life.

Today, the company is engaged in a continuous struggle with lawsuits launched against it by those claiming copyright violations. But that was a choice that Hurley and Chen decided to take on in order to give their users what they wanted. “We operate under the law,” says Hurley. “We have from day one.” While they abide by the law in removing copyrighted files once there has been a complaint by the owner, they make no claims to censor or remove files on their own.

Hurley and Chen realized early on the value of being able to provide unique content to their users. Their first startup, a website that was meant to follow in the steps of HotOrNot.com, could never get off the ground. The site received little traffic and when Hurley and Chen acknowledged that it was not going to be the success they thought it was, they quickly changed routes.

They switched their website from focusing on singles, to a general-purpose video sharing site with YouTube. By encouraging user interaction, Hurley and Chen also allowed the online community to fulfill its own needs. Users could now let the world know what files they were looking for, and no matter how obscure, chances were that somebody else out there could upload it for you. By allowing such freedom and user control, YouTube became a wealth of video gems that many thought had been lost forever.

YouTube’s other major advantage was not just in its being able to offer popular classic clips, but in the everyday clips that the average user could upload by themselves. “What our users want to watch is themselves,” says Hurley. “They don't want to watch professionally produced content. There are so many people with cameras that have the opportunity to create their own content and so many more people with editing tools to tell their stories.”

For that reason, Hurley is fairly confident that even if all the major Hollywood producers and music artists pull their copyrighted content from the site, YouTube will nevertheless continue to have a bright future, saying, “We feel this is just the tip of the iceberg.”



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