First post of the semester!

Finally...

After contemplating a topic for this blog over the last few weeks, one finally came to me - describing what the "e-life" is, to me, and how it is changing our lives, and everything around us.

The first thing that came to my mind was Youtube.

Everyone has spent at least some part of their day killing time on Youtube watching videos. Some people spend a couple of minutes, and some spend a couple of hours - it all depends on the situation, especially if something like alcohol is involved.

Watching ridiculous videos of people falling down, or babies making funny faces are favorite past times of people of all types. Just check the view counts... "Charlie bit my finger" has over 77 million views...

If you were a big company, or even the people responsible for the video, wouldn't you want some money for those 77 million views? I know I would...

Lately, I have seen a lot of advertising on the sidebars of those videos, as well as pop-ups that go over the videos themselves - advertising a t-shirt or something that references the video. My initial reaction to the advertisements was, "wow, this is pretty annoying" but now that I think about it, the idea is genius. The videos already get watched more than most TV shows, and are constantly visited thousands of times a day, so why wouldn't you want to advertise on them? The same goes for the video makers. If that many people are watching your videos, you have an opportunity to get them to buy things - and that is what television exists for in the first place; to show you advertisements so you can buy things.

Sure it takes the fun away from it, but cash does rule everything around us, so we don't really have a choice.

This relates to McLuhans famous quote, "The medium is the message." If you are trying to market video making software you can use at home, what better medium to use than a web site where people post home made videos? There are plenty of different ads on Youtube, and every other video site on the web as well, so try and notice them next time you are watching one and see how it relates to the site or video.