Financial & Economic Blog

A short post today -- based on a couple of my recent interactions with/on YouTube.

We just published a research report, Uploading To Video Portals Isn't Easy, that looked at the usability of five video portals (thanks to Ross Popoff-Walker who did most of the work). It turns out that YouTube's usability was pretty good. Here's a summary of the report:

Forrester applied an abridged version of its Web Site Review methodology to the site experiences at five major video portal sites: YouTube, Yahoo! Video, Metacafe, Dailymotion, and Veoh. Our evaluation looked at how well each site supports young adults trying to upload a new video clip. Only YouTube received a passing overall score. Some of the major problems we found across the sites: poor contextual help and deficient privacy information.

I also just found out that someone posted an excerpt of my speech from Forrester's Finance Forum on YouTube. It was probably done by Forrester's marketing department; hoping that the video would generate the same buzz on YouTube as coke + menthos or the dancing cadet. :-)

Well, I can assure you that my video is not nearly as exciting as the running Russian video. But if you want to see a portion of my keynote speech on Experience-Based Differentiation, then here it is.

Unfortunately, you only see me -- and can't see any of the slides. Maybe someone in the audience who was illegally taping the event will post a video that shows the slides as well. You never know.

The bottom line: YouTube makes it easy to upload anything.