Youtube Launches Creator’s Playbook: No More Crappy Content?

The quality of the content is very much a key part of attracting quality advertisers, and Youtube is starting to raise the bar on content.

Gone are the days when grainy, amateur videos dominated Youtube. Today, much of the content on Youtube seems to be produced by people who have Hollywood-type production budgets—sort of.  Whilst the occasional mobile upload of a baby laughing still goes viral, Youtube is now encouraging producers to ramp up their efforts.

In an effort to encourage the creation of higher quality content, Youtube has made available what is dubbed the ‘Creator’s Playbook’.  The 70 page guide outlines the approach producers should take when making videos for youtube, as well as what sort of features they can use to make their videos stand out. The comprehensive guide is broken down into 3 sections covering, Programming & Producing, Publishing & Optimization, and Community & Social Media.

There is, however, a caveat. Youtube is making it very clear that use of the playbook does not constitute in any way a guarantee of success. The playbook is really just a guide on what Youtube considers ‘best practices’. Still, a reference guide is useful and should help struggling Youtube producers get their videos noticed.

Youtube has been an outlet for people who otherwise wouldn’t have one. Indeed, Youtube can be considered the vanguard of the online video revolution. Let’s just hope that the Creators Playbook is not a harbinger of a more ‘commercial’ focused Youtube. User-generated content is what built Youtube and it would be a shame if it started to favor the bigger video producers.

Watch the video below to see an example of the type of high quality content Youtube is looking for.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks8PZ8X6Yo8

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Google Launches Hotel Finder

Google rolled out its Hotel Finder service, which is called as an experiment in finding the perfect hotel. Users can input a location, date for check-in and check-out, and the price range of the hotel. They can also choose the class and rating of the hotel.

Hotel Finder also lets users search via shape, where the users can outline the boundary of the search area. This feature is similar to Yahoo’s Sketch-A-Search, a technology that the company launched in 2010.

Hotel Finder is similar to Google Places in a way except it only gives out hotels in its search results. It could be a complementary service for its ITA travel integration. The new service is not a beta but is considered an experiment.

Google announced that it has plans to acquire ITA for $700 million in July 2010. It specializes in organizing airline data such as availability, flight times, and prices. Google said that acquiring ITA will help it produce new flight search services to simplify the process of comparing different options, searching for available flights, and buying tickets. The deal was recently approved by the Justice Department.

Hotel Finder is a good way to promote Google’s AdWords. After reading the reviews made by other users for hotels, the person can click on a drop-down menu for listings from Expedia, Travelocity, and other review sites.

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Amazon Launches Kindle Textbook Rental Program

Amazon announced that it has a new Kindle textbook rental program for college students. This is another reason why consumers should not walk into another brick-and-mortar bookstore to buy books. The announcement came out the same day Borders bookstores said that it has filed for bankruptcy. The bookstore chain blamed the changing book industry as well as the economy.

A poll made last October showed that 63 percent believed that ebook readers have decreased the profits of print books while 22 percent of book sellers believed that ebook readers decreased their sales. 70 percent of those surveyed said that ebook readers would affect the sale of new books than used books.

Amazon’s new textbook rental program lets the students save all the notes and highlighted contents from a rented book and access them in the future. Online book sellers view textbook rental companies as their fierce competitors.

Barnes & Noble said that it is struggling to survive as consumers buy three digital books for every physical book. This is the reason why the company is trying to reinvent itself into a vendor of book downloads, reading apps and devices. Every retailer is faced with the same problem and they have to adjust to the changing technology in order to survive.

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