An Evaluation of YouTube
By Riley Safford and Matthew Warwick
YouTube may very well be the paramount procrastination tool in a college students arsenal. You can easily spend hours and hours browsing the seemingly endless supply of videos that YouTube offers. From videos involving educational math tutorials to comedy sketches, YouTube has something for everyone. Founded in 2005, YouTube is one of the largest video-sharing service on the web. People access YouTube for videos pertaining to news, entertainment, music, and more. YouTube also encourages user creativity through the fact that it is driven by user-generated content. At first glance, YouTube seems to be a college students recreational paradise. However, such a site is not without its faults. Being one of the major players and innovators in the world of Web 2.0, YouTube has created an e-environment with a high accessibility level, simplistic layout and appearance, but a questionable quality of content.
The World Wide Web is an unending search engine where you have the ability to find nearly anything that you could possibly imagine. If you want to find a how-to video or just watch some funny videos, the place to go is YouTube. It seems to have an unending amount of videos in any category that you can think of, such as how-to, humorous or music related videos. It is a website that can be used by anyone from any country all over the world which gives it easy accessibility. Anyone can access it, maneuver through it and view the content of it from anywhere; it is one of the most accessible sites out there. The menus are laid out in a simple fashion, with tabs for accessing your subscriptions, profile, and news feed. Uploading a video can even be done from the homepage with the click of one button! Rarely does YouTube not have a video that you’re searching for due to the vast number of people that upload videos to the site every single day. YouTube is one of the most user friendly sites around because of how accessible is to almost everyone. This is also due to the layout of the site and how it is user friendly to the visitors.
YouTube sticks to a simplistic, yet striking appearance. The color scheme of the site is red on white. This combination forces the dynamic reds to pop off the screen so that the user can easily navigate the site. If you have an account, YouTube’s homepage is laid out in an aesthetically pleasing manner. On the left and right sides of the screen, you will find your list of subscribed channels and recommended channels, respectively. The middle portion holds a sort of news feed for all channels you have subscribed to where recent uploads can be viewed, as well as a few channels that YouTube chooses to promote. This design reflects YouTube’s simplistic appearance, in that it is a simple interface for users to access content. Furthermore, this basic layout makes the site much more appealing to the eye. If the videos were organized in a more stylistic way, it may prove to distract from the point of YouTube, which is the content of the videos.
With millions and millions of content creators, YouTube has the issue of diluted content. It can be hit-and-miss when trying to find videos that are humorous or informative. As the quantity of videos increases exponentially each year, the overall quality of content that YouTube provides has declined. However, this is not to say that the site is without merit. There are plenty of excellent, high quality videos to be viewed, it is only a matter of finding channels that you enjoy and building a subscription list that matches your personal tastes. By doing this, you can ensure that you will see a lot of videos that correlate with your personal tastes, as YouTube will also recommend videos based on videos you have viewed as well as your subscription list. Top contributors will usually upload about one video per day, so, depending on your preferences, it is likely that there will always be content available to you. This means that although you may have to search for it, there is a wealth of high-quality content available to you as a user. If you wish to create content, then that is another matter.
Content creation is the pillar on which the empire of YouTube stands. All content on YouTube is user-generated, which means that even you can get in on the action. All you need is a camera (a default feature on many laptops and phones), video editing software (which is also on many laptops by default), and a free YouTube account. Popular video topics for new users on YouTube include news shows, comedy sketch shows, and LetsPlays or video game commentaries. If you create enough videos and have a large enough viewer base, it is possible to become a YouTube partner. Partnership gives you the ability to monetize your videos with ad revenue if you have over 15,000 hours of viewership over 90 days. This allows certain YouTubers to attain an “e-celebrity” status, which, in some cases, involves them forming a career through creating YouTube videos and raking in revenue. Although it is somewhat difficult to be noticed in a sea of other content creators, the rewards can be bountiful. Some channels make up to six-figure salaries!
YouTube, a website with a vast number of videos that give joy to so many people around the world, is incredible because of how it allows users to express themselves through videos. The site is so accessible, that anyone from around the world can easily access and use it. YouTube’s simple, yet classic site design helps add to the accessibility and ease of use that users have come to expect over the years. Even though YouTube might have a diluted content quality, the vast size of the site allows it still to contain more high quality content than low quality content. User creativity is encouraged through the Partnership program, which allows content creators to monetize their channels through ad revenue and viewership. YouTube is one of the biggest websites on the web with one billion views each day. For a sense of perspective, YouTube has even more unique visitors in one day than Facebook. YouTube is a place where anyone from anywhere can view and share videos, making it one of the biggest and greatest websites on the internet, as well as one that you should most definitely consider visiting.
No comments:
Post a Comment