If you are like me, when you heard that Google had bought YouTube for $1.6 billion back in November 2006, you wondered “Why couldn’t that have been me?”
Well, maybe now it could be, as with the help with StartYourTube, you too can start a video sharing site to mimic YouTube.
Using YouTube
The people behind the website realise that YouTube is by far the most popular video sharing destination on the Internet, and have utilised that popularity to entice people to sign up to the site.
The site even includes the immortal line “YouTube sold for $1.6 billion. How much will you sell yours for?” feeding straight in to the egos of people who think they could be behind the next Web phenomenon.
YouTube Clone
StartYourTube does exactly what it says on the tin, allowing anyone, from any walk of life, with even the most limited knowledge of computers, and the technology behind Web TV, to start their own YouTube clone.
You go to the site, sign up, and follow the guidelines. There are customization options, including changing the colours, look and feel to your Tube, and you can even add custom graphics.
You then create your own domain for your Tube, and mask the site to it. You and friends can then instantly start uploading your choice of content, which can pretty much be anything, excluding sex and violence obviously.
In addition to videos, and in an effort to offer something more than YouTube does, you can also add pictures, audio files and blogs too.
A Diverse Range Of Tubes
Over 13000 Tubes have now been created, covering a range of topics and subject matter as diverse as snowboarding, hunting and animé.
The service is free to begin with, but fees do come in to it if you want/need to increase content limits. The comeback is that publishers get to keep 60% of all ad revenues from their Tube.
This is an ingenious idea, and with hundreds starting new Tubes every day, the site could very easily take off massively. However, I doubt it’ll ever reach the dizzying heights YouTube itself has managed, and consequently, Google won’t come knocking
