YouTube and Google

Whether you were aware of this or not, Google has purchased YouTube. Regularly this type of transaction wouldn't raise any eyebrows, but I wanted to share a couple of things that I have noticed straight-away with this transaction. First, I've noticed that nearly all video pages are now displaying Google Adsense images as well as Google Search capabilities. Personally, I don't think that is such a bad thing, but I am concerned that when advertisers are brought into the mix that creative license (in the form of freedom of speech) may possibly be infringed upon. Granted, we American's take these things ridiculously seriously, but I would hate to see creative license silenced in the form of political correctness.

Another thing that I have noticed is that many of the popular YouTube channels are now "partners". This is a pretty cool thing for the channel directors and whatnot, but it is annoying to anyone viewing the channels for a simple reason. hen you begin a video you are greeted by an advertisement that you must close in order to watch the video on the player. This isn't that big of a deal, but when you are used to clicking and watching, it can be annoying trying to close out an ad and accidentally clicking slightly to the left or right of the "x" and then loading an ad that closes the page you wanted to load originally. This gets pretty annoying. 

Having said that, I hope that people who are partnering up with Google and YouTube are aware that their content will be subjected to approval in order to run advertisements. In addition, I heard that the rating system and search system will be refined similar to "clean" and "dirty"searches. It would seem to me that this would bury some channels that tend to be more controversial and less "mainstream". I will be interested to see if YouTube becomes more sterile in lieu of this new venture. I suspect that a lot of great/tongue in cheek content will be replaced with, as I mentioned earlier, bland material. 

I suspect that YouTube as we know it, is going to be a thing of the past. I guess we should have expected this as soon as it went mainstream during the election cycle. All god things must come to an end. Granted, this isn't the "end", as YouTube will still be around, it just will be a bit more censored than many would prefer.