Hunter Walk explains why video discovery startups are flawed.

My two favorite points of Hunter Walk's article:

Verticalized content needs context not just collections. Many of these startup founders would provide the example of a particular interest and describe how an enthusiast would want to come to their site to see [fishing, cooking, fitness, travel, etc] videos. But just a collection of embedded thematic videos isn't enough - the real fan wants content, community, editorial. They already get their videos as part of the sites they visit today - along with text and images. A bunch of three minute videos with varying quality, metadata and sources isn't enough value, not when some blogger is already picking the best of these and adding content around them.

Social video is not a standalone product, just a signal. For a while many companies were simply pulling the video shared by your Facebook friends and people you follow on Twitter to create social collections of content. These failed as standalone products because (a) social graph != interest graph and (b) removing the context and conversation took social videos and made them non-social. Fail.

Both of those points make sense to me, and I'm going to think about them more.

Content, community, and editorial are what make videos interesting.

And social graph is NOT interest graph.

I guess that's why socially-curated, location-based, augmented reality startups fail too. :-(  Geographic context isn't enough neither (not that's not no double negative).

People were confused by the original image I chose so I replaced it with a Spock Chess video.

The longer I use the internet, the more I realize that content, community, and editorial make the INTERNET interesting.

That's why services like Reddit and Twitter keep growing, I think.

Bonus is these comments from Brian Norgard, co-founder of Chill:

After explosive growth largely enabled by the Open Graph bonanza of 2012 we (Chill) quickly learned consumers vastly preferred our curated 'Chill video of the day' to our more intensive—highly visual—social discovery experience.

From a product designer's perspective I was totally baffled. How can this be? We built all this amazing technology and people would rather receive an email. Really? After digging in it became abundantly clear that most videos are discovered/consumed while surfing around the Web (aside from YouTube and Hulu)—in context as you might say. It's fairly binary: people either want extreme context and signal around video or a search box. Said another way, most people don't want to work for video (or anything else for that matter on the consumer Internet). YouTube clearly has run away with the search and destroy business. That pretty much leaves news sites, social networks and hyper vertical communities for the rest of the video discovery pie.

It's not just videos people don't want to work for.

Many users prefer PandaWhale's daily emails to coming to our website.

And http://bakadesuyo.com/ has 40,000 email subscribers -- they want curation, not everything.

Wait...if you get a PW email, how do you read the story without ever coming to the site?

They get the email and then click through to the site on something they're interested in.

Instead of just coming to http://pandawhale.com/ looking for golden nuggets.

how does bakadesuyo make money ??

Right now he doesn't make money through the site.

One day he will collect speaker fees after selling many books and ebooks.

ah. it is still part of a long plan.  gotcha.  

Yessir. Long plans are everywhere these days.