Goodbye cute cat videos, hello cash cow. If browsing YouTube for
funny videos is part of your Friday (or Monday, or Tuesday, or ... you
get the point) morning routine then you'll already have had a surprise:
Gone is YouTube's old cluttered image, with ill-defined boxes of widgets
that seemingly blended into other nearby sections of the page. Gone is
its use of large sections of white page. Instead, in their place,
there's a smooth gray-tinted look and feel to Google's prime video
site, and a massive emphasis on "channels" and curated categories.
Google announced
last month that it was going to source more professionally made content
as well as flow more of its content into Channels--thematically linked
sections of the site that would feel a little more like your standard
cable TV box perhaps (sports channels, news channels, science...and so
on). And it's emphasized on its new blog
posting that this redesign is all about that notion. "We want to make
it easier for you to find and keep tabs of what you want to watch," it
suggests, and glancing down the dark-gray column on the left of the new
page that certainly seems true: If you're in the mood for vid clips
about music, sports, comedy, science, gaming, and a long list of other
topics, they're now collected into an easy-to-access channel.
But
this box is also customizable: Sign in to YouTube and you can arrange
your own list, alongside Google's curated ones, and the clips it's
recommended for you--Google handily points out that you can "even link
your YouTube account to Google+ and Facebook to see what your friends
are sharing" (and it's notable that Google's falling out with Twitter
seems to also extend to this new social link).
Uploaders also
benefit from the Channel-centric redesign, and, the site tells us: "As
different uploaders have different goals, we've created new Channel
templates to meet your needs whether you produce one video a week or
have thousands of videos for a fan to browse." To that end Google's
noting it's incorporated "feedback from the 'Cosmic Panda' Channels and
Watch experiment" (okay, perhaps cute animal videos are not going away)
and that it's "excited to present" its range of improvements that also
includes "a way to keep your audience engaged even when you don't have
new uploads." This last bit seems a very professional-sounding idea,
designed to appeal to keen content generators.
What Google is trying to do to every video
that's uploaded is to squeeze it into a channel right from the start--to
box it, package it, line it up with similar peers and so on, and to
encourage uploaders to think of their audience in the same way that a TV
channel may.
And from a user endpoint, the goal is even more
obvious: By banishing the chaotic, eclectic colors, segments and detail
of the previous design, and making it easier to stay on video topic as
well as keeping up with video recommendations from your social network,
it's trying to keep viewers on the page for longer. The experience is
simply more pleasant and easier to navigate. That's also the job of the
new psuedo news-feed segment on the home page--a window that contains
content, social activity info, and so on. Like the updating news feed of
Facebook or Twitter's rolling updates it creates a sense of dynamism,
change...and some detail that pops up in this window is bound to catch
the viewer's eye and entice them to engage with the site in some way,
perhaps watching one more video.
In the end it's all about money.
The more users engage with the site, the more eyes-on-advertising time
they give to Google. And by aligning itself as a sort of desktop
equivalent to a cable TV, with easily accessible Channels of similar
content (albeit a mix of user-submitted and professionally created
video) Google is trying to compete with TV on more equal footing. In the
light of the redesign the previous YouTube UI looked amateurish,
child-like even. What it has now is perhaps the same sort of simple yet
powerful interface that users will be familiar with from apps like
Instagram or Twitter--much simpler, more accessible, and thus more
powerful.
Which makes us wonder if Google has plans to bring this
sort of radical makeover to its other services. It recently toyed with
the black Google bar on its search page, and has ditched it after a user
revolt. And for years Google's look and feel has felt a little stuck in
the past, with a very text-centric approach and a graphical style that
seemed to have been drawn up by over-enthusiastic engineers rather than
artists. Is Google actually growing up, realizing it needs to refine its
offerings (as demonstrated by its recent shuttering of Google Labs
projects) and add a degree of visual spit and polish that some of its rivals
have long surpassed Google in? If you are in a particularly positive
frame of mind, you may even see this as proof Google's future Google TV
offerings may be a serious entry to what may be a very big connected TV market in 2012.
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