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WhoTube?

The biggest non-event on the NZ internet scene happened yesterday, but most Kiwis probably knew nothing about it until they watched the 6pm news.

Yes, YouTube launched its Australian and New Zealand websites, not that you'd have noticed.

When I heard the news I (naturally) rushed off to the local version of this iconic video-sharing website to see just how well they'd customised and packaged content for a bunch of keen Kiwis.

What a massive disappointment that was.

Yesterday, on the day of the launch, I saw very little Kiwi content on nz.youtube.com's front page.

In fact, I was hard pushed to see *anything* from NZ, except the boring little canned monologue in the top right corner.

In fact, the most boldly visible clip when I visited was one from a Canadian poster titled#536 Brownies.

As we saw on TV, there was plenty of backslapping and self-congratulations going on at the launch function, and obviously the mainstream media thought this was just great (free food and booze?).

But surely YouTube could have spent a little time and money to produce a front page that (at least on launch-day) really worked hard to highlight the best in *KIWI* content that's been uploaded to the site.

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Strangely enough, they seemed very pleased that it had gotten a few hundred views.

With the name "TVNZ" in the title, and given that TVNZ are a key content provider for the new site, I think they should be far from happy at such a poor result.

So how could YouTube improve their allegedly NZ site?

Well how about some nice interactivity on the front page...?

Let's see a map of NZ with some kind of overlay that shows just where most of the videos have been posted from.

And what functionality is already there seems badly broken in places.

For example, I clicked on "Most Viewed" and expected to see the most popular vids that had been uploaded to YouTube by Kiwis.

So why does the top-ranking vid only show 477 views this morning. Hell, one of my own contributions to YouTube has already scored over 160,000 hits -- where's that?

Of course that "most viewed" list is clearly stuffed -- since clicking on "top favourites" I see clips with thousands of views to their credit.

Quite frankly, if YouTube NZ doesn't offer any real benefits over the regular site, people just won't use it.

It's a great idea to provide an inbuilt country-specific filter and ranking system but if it doesn't work then it's worse than useless.

So I thought I'd check out YouTube Australia and see if they were treated any differently.

Hell no -- it's the same "yawn" as YouTube NZ.

Instead of taking the opportunity to add some great extra value to YouTube content by localising it they've simply insulted Kiwis and Aussies by effectively saying "we really don't think you're worth anything more than a tiny little banner and some exceptionally poor and flawed filtering.

One can't help but get the feeling that this is simply an attempt to simplify the marketing of ad-space. By creating (supposedly) geographically-specific sites, it becomes easier to pitch ad-space to those players who only want to target a particular country.

Sorry YouTube -- I don't buy it.

If you'd spent half as much producing a *real* country-specific version of your website as you did on your launch party then I think a lot of *USERS* (as opposed to easily embalmed mainstream media) would be happy today.

What's your take on the Kiwi YouTube?

Did you really notice any difference?

Do you feel honoured or insulted when you look at the amount of effort that's gone into producing a version of YouTube designed to appeal specifically to the residents of GodZone?

Will you be using the local version of YouTube or the same old YouTube.com that you've always used?

Let's just hope they don't start automatically redirecting web-surfers from NZ to nz.youtube.com instead of youtube.com (as they do with Google.com).

Have your say on this...

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