Popular new kid YouTube

YouTube is like the new kid at school everyone wants to meet (or compete with). This week’s signs that the video-sharing site has truly arrived are: use of the site by the US government, fresh competition from Microsoft, and deals with Warner Music and ABC. The White House is using YouTube to expand its anti-drug public-service advertising, putting made-for-TV anti-drug videos on the site,” the Associated Press reports. They’ll “compete for viewership against hundreds of existing, drug-related videos that include shaky footage of college-age kids smoking marijuana and girls dancing wildly after purportedly using cocaine,” according to the AP. “Other YouTube videos describe how to grow marijuana and how to cook with it.” At last count, YouTube gets 34 million visitors a month, MySpace Video gets 17.9 million and Google Video 13.5 million, according to the BBC. So Microsoft, whose MSN Video used to be the most popular video-sharing site (before YouTube’s arrival), has unveiled some fresh competition (in beta testing): “Soapbox” , obviously designed to integrate well with MSN instant messaging more closely matching the MySpace video-sharing experience. Meanwhile, Warner Music’s ad-revenue-sharing licensing deal with YouTube is an unprecedented experiment that some analysts are calling a legal “minefield.” Warner’s the first major label to authorize YouTube to show its music videos, the New York Times reports. Under the agreement, “YouTube.com will use special software to identify recordings used in videos posted by users and then offer the owner of the copyrighted music a percentage of the fee for advertising that would run alongside the clip. The deal also provides for the copyright owner to demand that YouTube remove the clip instead,” according to the Times, which also ran a “video mania” business story. Another deal YouTube announced this week was with ABC and Cingular: a talent hunt for the best unsigned bands on YouTube. The winners will get to appear on ABC’s Good Morning America, Reuters reports. This week Forbes aptly asks, “Can YouTube Grow Up and Stay Cool?”