It's true, most people probably won't watch ads after the vdeo. I can't speak for anyone else, but I usually wont even watch the credits. Maybe if video makers did what filmmakers do now, have a bonus scene after the credits. You would see a video, the credits, a short ad, and final a bonus scene. A lot of people still wouldn't watch, but it's a possibility.

It's a good point. A lot of YouTube videos make use of copyrighted material, and although they credit the original creators, users seem paranoid about what the companies will do to them. By opening the site up to advertisers, it becomes even more likely that the big companies will start censoring what users can post.

This is exactly the fear of users. They use songs and video clips, and even though they aren't making money for their videos and most of the users do credit the original artists, they know that big companies can come along and tear their work down. Which isn't fair, when you think about it. All art is influenced by other art. In previous generations, it was okay for kids who became artists to begin by tracing and kids who became writers to begin copying other writers' styles, and kids who became directors to use action figures and a script drawn from other scripts. It's how people grow and discover who they are and what they want to say.

Fragmentation has decimated the audiences of the big networks, but it's also been the reason so many new channels have been created: Animal Planet, the cooking channel, the sci-fi channel. And viewers watching these channels have special interest in the subject, so they are more likely to actually watch the commercials. So it's mostly the bigger networks that are suffering, which explains why there are so many reality TV shows on the major channels now. While they aren't "reality," they don't need a script so much as a situation.

Yes, a lot of shows are available online anytime, and also on Comcast. So, the big corporations are tryng to deal with the fragmentation. The problem with that is that it's still not exactly interactive, which is the thing people love about YouTube. This still doesn't address the issue that everyone wants to be a star.

So, Internet as a writing space remediates early TV as a writing space, which was at the time remediating radio as a writing space. Only later did innovations for each particular space come to exist.

This is an interesting point about society and art. We place a lot of value on nonfiction now, much more than we used to. People are getting caught writing "fake" memiors and getting in a lot of trouble for it. We might not expect actors who play the parts to be the real characters, but we often do expect characters to be real.

This relates to the readings we did for Tuesday, too, specifically "We Are the Web." I'm curious what the sample population was. Considering how many people have blogs, YouTube accounts, webpages, and accounts on other subject-specific websites, I would think 38% was rather low. I wonder if they surveyed peope in general, or people using the Web.