While the service is down, please consider cleaning your house, washing your car, taking a walk outside (gasp!), visiting a new startup, reading a book, etc. Check out our YouTube down section for previous outages.

Interestingly, the “down for maintenance” page (as seen below) includes a search box. The search works but any video you select displays the same down for maintenance page – it’s an endless loop! As always please report in if YouTube is down where you are located.

As usual, please report in if you are experiencing issues with YouTube (or any other Google service). I hope they can get everything fixed so that we can watch more cat videos!

The last YouTube outage occured on April 23rd. At least Twitter is up and stable.

There are a variety of categories including geek, happy, politics, sports and wtf. They are actively seeking sponsors to create “sponsored channels” and as a test they are using videos from the TED conference. Reddit has integrated Twitter as well so you can send messages to your followers which push them to the Reddit page (not the source content page).

Here’s a video from Reddit on how the service works…

This puts Hulu right behind Google/YouTube and Fox Interactive and moves Hulu above Yahoo, Microsoft and Viacom. To put the 380 million mark in perspective, Google including YouTube videos were viewed over 5 billion times.

comScore is also reporting that for the month of March, Google/YouTube passed 100 million unique viewers. Hulu came in with 41 million viewers which puts the online video service in the 4th slot.

Other notes from comScore include: 77.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video and the average video length was just over 3 minutes.

Do you find yourself watching a lot of videos on Hulu? To be honest I’ve only used the service when I have missed a TV show that they offer (e.g. Lost, Chuck, etc.).

Scott noted that the 100 paid reviewers of the Ford Fiesta will disclose that they are part of the “movement”. That’s great that there will be disclosure – it’s something that many of the paid reviews systems have moved to. And while I am using Ford as an example, they are by no means alone with regards to my question. Whether it’s Izea, Magpie, in-house ad sales, etc, the question continues to grow in importance. And I haven’t even mentioned pimping by investors, friends, family members, etc.

Disclosure is easy on a blog, but what about as the blog entry is pushed around. Does the disclosure travel with the blog entry? And more importantly, what about all of the social media services like Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Plurk, etc.? How do we define disclosure on these networks?

Scott says that twitter messages will be tagged with a #tag. But if I am a new/general user of Twitter, how do I know that #tag means that it’s a sponsored message? Magpie sticks #magpie into the Twitter message but the same question applies. What if I want to note my post about the Ford Fiesta on Twitter – if I use the #tag, does it then appear that it’s a sponsored post? What about users who find a Twitter message via a search? What about retweets (that is where another Twitter user shares a message from another user)?

Melanie Notkin was paid by Disney to push out Twitter messages about a new movie release. In her blog post she noted, “Every time I tweet a ’sponsored’ tweet from Disney, I will use #SADisney. That way, you’ll know it.” That works for people who have read her blog post, but what about all of the new followers she gets each day, users searching for Disney or people that don’t read her blog. How do they know that she isn’t just saying she likes the Disney movie and is instead getting paid to push messages to her followers?

Twitter’s not alone – what about photos on Flickr or videos on YouTube. Yesterday I watched a video that was paid for by Intel about Intel. The blog post noted that the video was paid but there was nothing in the actual video regarding the sponsored status. Had they put a note upfront about the paid status inside of the video, that would suffice for the video medium. So viewers on Youtube.com or in an embed have no idea the content was paid.

As more companies expand their efforts to buy users in return for authoritative media impressions and content, this issue of paid social media disclosure will only continue to rise. And companies will increase their spend in this area because it’s cheap and provides a greater return than a traditional banner ad or widget.

The bottom line is that just sticking a hashtag (e.g. #tag) on a twitter message, photo or video isn’t enough to properly disclose a relationship.

Could it be that some companies actually like this usage of paid social media because it looks very authentic and they can claim disclosure that most system users will never realize is actually sponsored or paid? I certainly hope not.

We need to come together to to develop standards around social media disclosure so that we never blur the lines between a person paid for their content and those who are doing it out of true passion or concern. On the other hand, we could just assume everything we read on any of the social media sites is paid.

There’s a bunch of chatter about the outage over on Twitter.  In fact questions about YouTube’s outage are coming in so quickly that the instant you hit submit, there are already a batch more in the search queue!

I understand there are several people visiting local hospitals because they are unable to watch the latest cat videos. People, please remain calm during this unfortunate time. 

As always, please report in if YouTube is down for you as well.

Update: 2:50 pm – YouTube appears to be back to normal except for the HUGE Honda car ad at the top of the page. Check out this groovy video of a new type of pizza box that breaks apart into plates and can also fold back into a storage box for the leftover pizza!

A number of bloggers and journalists covering the launch and one post from Steven Hodson caught my eye. He called the program, "the ultimate social media experiment". As I do with all paid post campaigns, I questioned if any of the 100 would actually post negative comments about the car. This experiment as Steven calls it is slightly different than your normal paid review, but I believe it’s still in the same family. I also wonder how the income associated with this experiment will be reported (sorry old accounting hat on momentarily). Ford global communications team member Scott Monty commented that the people in this program are allowed to say whatever they want whenever they want. Scott went on to reply to another commenter noting, "if you think – for one second – that Ford is telling these people what to say or that we’re only looking for glowing reviews, I want some of what you’re smoking." Probably not the best way for a Ford executive to talk to a potential customer.

After reading Scott’s comments and learning that he was in NYC today, I asked to meet with him to learn more about the program and have him answer some of my questions. We met this morning at the Javits Center where the International Auto Show is set to begin in a couple of days. Side note, I posted a bunch of photos of some exotic cars on Flickr this afternoon. I enjoyed the conversation and while there’s no doubt that Scott and I disagree about whether this program is equivalent to any other paid post/review campaign, I hope I left him with some things to think about and consider.

The net is that Ford is buying media mentions – if all they wanted was feedback, they would give the people a form and have them submit it. This is more of a PR campaign than it will ever be a social media campaign. Just because you use Twitter or YouTube does not just instantly make it social media. It will be interesting to see how disclosure is handled as well with the 100 digital influencers. Scott says each person is required to disclose – but what about on the social sites? Will every tweet, image uploaded to Flickr or video on Youtube have a note about disclosure? Scott says the media will be tagged but will the average Internet user get that a tag = paid post? This issue of social media disclosure is actually much bigger than this campaign.

Ford will most likely get more honest feedback than a traditional paid campaign because the 100 aren’t doing paid posts for a living like some of the other paid review sites. On those sites, negative can quickly mean no future work – that’s probably not the case here.

A few of the questions with regards to this campaign that Ford will need to analyze are:

• Will Ford be able to move the needle in terms of top of mind awareness for not just the 100 in the program but you and me?
• When they program is over and the Fiesta is in production, will you consider it when you shop for your next vehicle?
• Will your overall impression of Ford change (either better or worse)?

I am glad Ford is running this program. Is it perfect? Certainly not. But it allows us all to discuss the pros and cons and get that much closer to better online marketing programs. As I told Scott, I wish the attorneys at my past employer would have let us move an inch here and there – never happened. I will be watching how this campaign moves forward and you can rest assured my thoughts (unpaid, no car, no gas) will appear here. And I look forward to continuing my industry conversation with Scott in the future.

Check out my video conversation with Scott – I tried not to duplicate the content in this post and in the video.

Other notable facts from the report:

• YouTube passed the 100 million U.S. visitor mark for the month of October
• ESPN listed in tenth position for views – I wonder how many of those views come from their auto-launcher on the espn.com home page (hate that feature)
• All of Google’s video sites pushed out more than 5.3 billion video views for October

There’s a bunch of chatter about the outage over on Twitter. I understand there are several people visiting local hospitals because they are unable to watch the latest cat videos. People, please remain calm during this unfortunate time. 

As always, please report in if YouTube is down for you as well.

Update 10:45PM: YouTube does appear to load now however the site loads without the stylesheet.

Update 10:55PM: As c187 notes in the comments, Google’s server "http://s.ytimg.com" appears to be the issue now – and the reason for the style and look not loading.

Update 6AM: Apparently YouTube was down because they decided to bring out a awesome nasty looking new design update. Mike Arrington notes that they have also added a search bar to the embedded video option. My gut tells me they shrunk the header even further to allow for a larger ad space – but the text in the nav just looks like amateurish. I also noticed earlier this week they began trapping the referral url into the links inside the embedded movies. This will tell YouTube/Google where people are grabbing links from.

Hurley noted that when they started YouTube they weren’t familiar with the concept of "rights". They talk about the issues with Viacom and Hurley points to many brands actually wanting their videos on YouTube as they reach the company’s core customers.

On the topic of revenue models, Hurley said that the new click to buy will be one piece along with ads as the ads within the videos are more engaging than traditional display ads.

Kelly attempts to get Hurley to talk about costs for hosting, bandwidth, etc. but Hurley won’t share any figures.

Lastly the two talk about live streaming on YouTube. Hurley says that they are looking at new ways of engaging one another on YouTube and live streaming might be a piece of that but most importantly they will take their time on implementing these new engagement methods. 

Unfortunately BBC does not allow for embedding so you will need to watch the interview on their site.

Here we see DHL delivery agents wearing sandwich boards that have a mouse arrow on them. I am guessing the unions here in the U.S. have a provision to not allow delivery agents to walk around with huge arrows on them as they deliver packages.

And then we have the DHL delivery vans also sporting a mouse arrow.

The delivery agent has no URL on their uniform or on the arrow – the van has a small URL on it. That’s where I’d focus DHL.

What I am seeing with YouTube is that more consumer brands are leveraging the YouTube platform. If YouTube wants to generate real revenue, this is where it is. Sure there’s money in pre-roll ads, but partnering with large consumer brands will provide YouTube with a more level revenue stream. We will have to see over time how loyal YouTube users feel about brands invading their cat video sanctuary.

Check out the Compete posting for more detailed analysis about Jokeroo.

As I create more videos and have more discussions with online video talent, the conversation seems to move many times to finding the optimum hosting and distribution structure for video. I want to make sure my viewers never hit a dead end and can easily find other videos to view from the series. Since at least half of my videos are business-oriented, the idea of putting them on YouTube and hoping for the "viral effect" is not attractive. Earlier this year I wrote about the online video market here in NYC and I see it continuing to expand today.

Currently I am using Viddler almost exclusively for my videos. I like Viddler because their player allows for in-stream commenting and their upload function is easy-to-use. I find the uploading function on YouTube to be absolute crap, can’t they even offer an upload status bar?!? For the purposes of this discussion, we will only discuss pre-recorded video content and not live services (Mogulus, Ustream) or mobile video streaming (Kyte, Qik, Flixwagon).

I get the idea behind services like TubeMogul which put your content everywhere and I will probably look at doing this as well. But it’s critical from my standpoint that you select a video sharing/hosting partner to work with in which you can build your video brand. This means that the player that’s used on the video creator’s site remain consistent over time. Some video content creators are being paid to use services and I see this trend continuing as the video creation market expands and hosting networks fight to get out of the commodity business.

There are a number of indie video stars on the scene today. I’ve selected Justine and Gary Vaynerchuk to use as examples with regards to how they use various video hosting networks for their videos and shows. When I check out Justine’s Web site, she seems to use YouTube as her first choice and it’s clear that this strategy has helped her with growing her brand. Justine has over 18,000 subscribers on YouTube. These subscribers drive massive views to her videos. She uses Viddler as well for some videos and all of her videos are distributed there as well. Gary Vaynerchuk at WineLibraryTV uses Viddler for the main player on the site. Gary also has a distribution deal with Revision3 which publishes a shorter wine show on Revision3 and other video hosting providers including YouTube.

There are more options than ever for video hosting – from the most basic YouTube through working with distribution partners like ForYourImagination who can produce, record and package the shows. Viddler, Vimeo, Veoh all sit in the middle and I’d consider blip.tv a "show" distributor.

Below is the setup I have been considering for the videos I create on CN. My goal is to find the best combination of:

• reaching the largest audience
• using the best technology
• using a player with good usability for the viewer
• outside distribution to as many sources as possible
• tracking and analytics
• ability to monetize the videos over time — either with cpm views or finding a sponsor

Business Shows:

These are videos I shoot of product demos and also include our interviews like the one we shot with Dina Kaplan last week. I am looking at using blip.tv for these videos. blip.tv can offer me a gallery player to allow viewers to watch any video they like. blip.tv also has an advertising network and also works with shows to find sponsors. This is very attractive to me – especially in the beginning. blip.tv will also distribute the shows to iTunes which could work relatively well for creating loyal viewers.

Fun Videos:

These videos include the Twitter Song and How to Effectively Quit Blogging. I see continuing to post these videos on Viddler because the interactivity and community there is a perfect fit for these videos.

Conclusion

I’d love some feedback on my thoughts and suggested video network usage for CN. What am I missing in creating the right mix? The next mission is to get a better video setup and move away from my tiny Canon Elph to something a bit more professional.

Editor’s note: I am not paid (nor have I been) for using any video service to-date.

comScore

Here are the other notes from comScore for May 2008:

• 74 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 228 minutes of video.
• 82.2 million viewers watched 4.1 billion videos on YouTube.com (50.4 videos per viewer).
• 54.8 million viewers watched 703 million videos on MySpace.com (12.8 videos per viewer).
• 6.8 million viewers watched 88 million videos on Hulu.com (13.0 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 2.7 minutes.

YouTube will always come in with a higher video/user count because most of their videos are short, user-generated and are typically unplanned while sites like Hulu are longer shows and are typically planned.

Ashkan says more videos were watched than searches were performed.