Flickr, YouTube: Why popularity will kill them!

I guess you all know public multimedia services like Flickr for pics and YouTube for videos. We also love and use them.
An ordinary blog, with text only, is more or less already recognized as boring. Who takes time to read all your thoughts and rants? Yeah, maybe nobody. Unless you are one of the very few who stands out. We all want to be that, but let's talk about the other 99,9% of all bloggers: you and me!

Multimedia is a key factor for your blog if you want to attract readers. While almost nobody will read all your text, they all have time to watch a nice video or pic. People tend to take that time, because it's easy consumption. So, the seduction is huge to use these multimedia services, and they are so easy to implement. Just copy a small snippet of code and you are done! That's all.

But we are very sure that these services will soon come to an end, being killed by their popularity. Their business model is also their biggest enemy.
Why? Very simple. By more and more people using them, their popularity not only grows in their audience. It also grows in firewalls, ad blockers, web washers, you name it.
Several companies already block sites like Flickr and YouTube, and it's growing massively.
At the same time, this firewalls might stay open for the big players, but surely not for you. So, you are in trouble. At least sooner or later.
Your goal to attract readers by having an interesting, stylish multimedia blog can't be reached, because they can't watch your videos and pics anymore. Huge problem!

The only way out: go and host everything by yourself! We are sure in a near future this will be the only choice to let your blog survive.
Shouldn't be a big problem as webspace is getting cheaper and cheaper by the minute. But it's a loss of comfort. A huge loss!

But maybe that's the only choice you might have: brush up your HTML, your FTP know-how and find a fitting hoster. After that, it's still the content which makes you outstanding.

At least you and your blog will not get stuck in a firewall!

Exceptions. We knew you would ask that. Yes, we believe there will be one big exception: Google Video.
Alhtough there is the technical possibility to block subdomains like video.google.com, we believe that almost no company will block that. Why? Google as a service is already recognized as a business essential, so the uproar from employees might be to huge to try that. But who knows, nothing's for sure.

Related news: P4MR, Weblog, Blog, Citizen Media, Flickr, YouTube