Site helps fans play with videos.
By Janis Mara

A GUINEA PIG SPROUTS Romaine lettuce wings and soars aloft to a song by TMarie, a housewife shares her recipes for perfect chocolate chip cookies, and PresidentBush "sings" U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" in the top 10 video playlists on Berkeley-based video Web site Dabble.com.

The site, launched just two months ago by Mary Hodder of Berkeley, makes it possible to search through 2.6 million high-resolution video films online, then tag and organize them — and, of course, watch them.

The videos you see on sites like wildly popular, San Mateo-based YouTube and Mountain View-based Google Video are hosted — that is, stored on and served from — those sites. That means when you visit there, you can only watch videos from their site. Dabble searches the Internet for videos, then, like YouTube or photo site Flickr, lets you classify them in categories such as "comedy," cooking" or "politics."

Video is sizzling hot these days, with almost one-quarter of all Internet users — 24 percent — accessing video at least once a week, and 46 percent doing so at least once a month, according to a study by the Online Publishers Association. Some 18 billion videos streamed online in 2005, up from 14.2 billion in 2004, according to AccuStream iMedia Research.

"Well over 90 percent of peoples' time online is spentwith content, news being the number one category," said Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. "But video, of which news is the content leader, will be increasingly prominent in terms of what users do online."...

"We are getting 30,000 to 50,000 unique visitors daily. Not bad for a company that's only two months old," Hodder said. "We're very happy with the traffic."

Analyst Brian Haven of Forrester Research has commented that video sites "are becoming a dime a dozen," and Hodder readily acknowledges that there are some 260 such sites online. But Dabble is different, she says, because it searches the Web for videos instead of hosting them. Dabble currently has access to 2.6 million of the estimated 8 million videos online, and is working to get permission to aggregate the remainder.

http://www.insidebayarea.com/search/ci_4457347

Site helps fans play with videos
By Janis Mara, BUSINESS WRITER
Article Last Updated:10/07/2006 06:20:49 AM PDT

A GUINEA PIG SPROUTS Romaine lettuce wings and soars aloft to a song by TMarie, a housewife shares her recipes for perfect chocolate chip cookies, and PresidentBush "sings" U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" in the top 10 video playlists on Berkeley-based video Web site Dabble.com.

The site, launched just two months ago by Mary Hodder of Berkeley, makes it possible to search through 2.6 million high-resolution video films online, then tag and organize them — and, of course, watch them.

The videos you see on sites like wildly popular, San Mateo-based YouTube and Mountain View-based Google Video are hosted — that is, stored on and served from — those sites. That means when you visit there, you can only watch videos from their site. Dabble searches the Internet for videos, then, like YouTube or photo site Flickr, lets you classify them in categories such as "comedy," cooking" or "politics."

Video is sizzling hot these days, with almost one-quarter of all Internet users — 24 percent — accessing video at least once a week, and 46 percent doing so at least once a month, according to a study by the Online Publishers Association. Some 18 billion videos streamed online in 2005, up from 14.2 billion in 2004, according to AccuStream iMedia Research.

"Well over 90 percent of peoples' time online is spentwith content, news being the number one category," said Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. "But video, of which news is the content leader,
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will be increasingly prominent in terms of what users do online."

Hodder, Dabble's founder and chief executive, works out daily at a Berkeley gym just two blocks from the office and emanates a fresh-scrubbed glow of excitement over her newly launched business.

"I was just writing a search algorithm," says the 39-year-old CEO, leading the way up the stairs to a light-flooded office overlooking University Avenue in the heart of downtown Berkeley, where she and her nine employees work 10-hour days.

As new dot-coms launch and venture capital flows, a resurgence of the former dot-com boom dubbed "Web 2.0" is under way, and Dabble is part of it. Though most Web 2.0 startups are in San Francisco, as they were back in the late 1990s, both Dabble and another video-oriented site, Fliqz, launched in Berkeley in the last four months.

Like the dot-coms of days gone by, Dabble is funded by angel investors. Somewhat uncomfortably, like those long-gone dot-coms, the site isn't making any money. But there's a revenue model in place and a newly hired business manager to handle it. Like YouTube and most of the other video-oriented sites, Dabble.com plans to make money from advertising. Hodder says that she is already getting calls from potential advertisers.

"We are getting 30,000 to 50,000 unique visitors daily. Not bad for a company that's only two months old," Hodder said. "We're very happy with the traffic."

Analyst Brian Haven of Forrester Research has commented that video sites "are becoming a dime a dozen," and Hodder readily acknowledges that there are some 260 such sites online. But Dabble is different, she says, because it searches the Web for videos instead of hosting them. Dabble currently has access to 2.6 million of the estimated 8 million videos online, and is working to get permission to aggregate the remainder.

Dabble has a long way to go to catch up with YouTube, which accounts nearly half of all videos watched online with about 100 million viewings daily and has, according to Neilsen NetRatings, 20 million unique visitors a month. However, as Hodder points out, YouTube has been around a year and a half, and Dabble only two months.

Hodder, who holds a master's degree in information science from the University of California, Berkeley, worked at Technorati, is an information architect for several Web service companies with social media sites, and blogs for Napsterization and Berkeley news site Beast Blog.

"As more and more people make video, there's a giant fire hose of information online," Hodder said. "We're hoping to help people find what they're looking for."

Business Writer Janis Mara can be reached at (510) 208-6468 or jmara@angnewspapers.com.

So Forbes has a Mention of us in this strange "The Next YouTube" piece it ran.

Careful, when you launch the link, to look for the "stop" link right away, right above the "The Next YouTube" title, or it will start cycling through a bunch of other pages. I'm not sure what effect they're trying for, but the one they've got is definitely as annoying as hell :-)

But nevertheless, of course, nice to see Dabble mentioned in Forbes. And they seem to like us.

Oh yeah - they made Mary a Cal Professor too :-)

From
the article:

Make Your Own Channel

With user-generated photos and videos pouring out of dozens of me-too sites, smart aggregation tools are an obvious next step: Someone needs to keep track of all this stuff. One such solution is Dabble, lauched by University of California-Berkeley professor Mary Hodder in July. Dabble retrieves videos from users’ favorite sites around the web--kind of like a web-based TiVo. The video feeds show up at Dabble as a playlist.

Dabble was written up in USA Today!

Silicon Valley starts to party like it's 1999

The eight employees of digital media start-up Dabble work out of a cheap office, decorated mainly with sticky notes, not far from San Francisco.

They work long hours for below-market rates. Their boss, CEO Mary Hodder, is a 39-year-old Internet expert who has never started or run a company before.

Dabble has received funding from angel investors. But it must fight dozens of other start-ups for attention. And when they finally get off work, the Dabble team grapples with heavy traffic, crowded restaurants and outrageous housing prices.

But it's all OK, because Hodder and her crew are convinced that their company offers a compelling online service that will be a huge success - and will make their stock options pay off.

Sound a lot like 1999? Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, the world's technology hub, is starting to buzz again for the first time since the dot-com bust. The Valley's infamous start-up community is coming back, thanks to Dabble and its contemporaries. New powerhouses such as Google, eBay and Yahoo are driving growth and hiring workers. Stalwarts such as Hewlett-Packard and Oracle are reporting stronger sales and posting higher stock prices.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-09-11-tech-valley_x.htm

The eight employees of digital media start-up Dabble work out of a cheap office, decorated mainly with sticky notes, not far from San Francisco.

They work long hours for below-market rates. Their boss, CEO Mary Hodder, is a 39-year-old Internet expert who has never started or run a company before.

Dabble has received funding from angel investors. But it must fight dozens of other start-ups for attention. And when they finally get off work, the Dabble team grapples with heavy traffic, crowded restaurants and outrageous housing prices.

But it's all OK, because Hodder and her crew are convinced that their company offers a compelling online service that will be a huge success — and will make their stock options pay off.

Sound a lot like 1999? Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, the world's technology hub, is starting to buzz again for the first time since the dot-com bust. The Valley's infamous start-up community is coming back, thanks to Dabble and its contemporaries. New powerhouses such as Google, eBay and Yahoo are driving growth and hiring workers. Stalwarts such as Hewlett-Packard and Oracle are reporting stronger sales and posting higher stock prices.

Evidence of an uptick is everywhere. The amount of venture capital invested in Internet companies has jumped almost 75% since hitting bottom in 2003. The Valley unemployment rate has dropped to 5%, down from 9.3% during the darkest days. The median home price is $700,000 and rising. Party invitations are going out — and the buffets once again include shrimp.

It's a welcome change after five tough years of layoffs, bankruptcies and empty office parks.

"Bubbly things started happening three, four months ago," says Hodder. "It's exciting." This round of growth will be based on real, useful products without the excesses of the dot-com boom, she says.

Many other Valley technorati agree. But critics, especially those outside California, say that the Valley is once again getting caught up in its own hype.

Nicholas Carr, the Massachusetts-based author of the book Does IT Matter?, says he expects the tech industry to grow but at an increasingly slower pace. The current frenzy is a "miniboom" that will soon peter out, he says. "There isn't any sign that this new wave of entrepreneurial activity is capturing the imagination of the public the way it did before."

That hasn't stopped John Chambers, CEO of San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant Cisco Systems, from predicting that his already-huge company could see its revenue rise as much as 20% this fiscal year. (An acquisition accounts for part of the increase.)

Chambers and Cisco were badly burned by the bust. Cisco shares trade at about one-fourth their boom-era high. But Chambers believes Cisco and the industry can grow without a crash. This time, "The circumstances are dramatically different," he says. "There were a lot of lessons learned."

Many tech entrepreneurs insist that they, too, will not make the same mistakes. Hodder started Dabble — a site that allows people to search, organize and bookmark videos — with $350,000 in seed money. Future funding proposals are modest. "We're not going to go crazy," she says.

Budgets are also tight at Redwood City, Calif., start-up Renkoo. Co-founder Joyce Park has strong memories of being unemployed during the bust, "sitting in front of Palo Alto City Hall, drinking triple espressos, going, 'Man, this is depressing,' " she says.

She started her company, which offers an online service to help people plan casual gatherings, with longtime friend and co-worker Adam Rifkin in her kitchen. She carefully sought out venture capitalists that offered advice, not just money. (Renkoo closed a $3 million round in March.) And she has made a habit of hiring engineers and other technical workers who are inexperienced but have potential to grow.

Playing it safe, mostly

Some of the Valley's biggest companies are also being cautious. No. 1 chipmaker Intel last week said it is cutting 10,500 jobs in a bid to save money and make the company more nimble. Hewlett-Packard is cutting about 15,000 jobs as part of a restructuring. (The No. 2 PC maker is also embroiled in a boardroom scandal related to the aggressive way the board hunted for the source of news leaks to the press. Story, 1B.)

Caution is wise, says Kevin Wagner, an equity analyst at Baring Asset Management. New technologies such as advanced cellphone networks and state-of-the-art video game systems should help keep tech growing, he says. But the growth will be more modest than before, with small busts in limited areas, he says.

Still, the Valley isn't playing it completely safe. Video site YouTube has received $11.5 million from venture capitalists, despite the thorny issue of thousands of copyrighted videos that are uploaded by users. Staffers maintain a chatty blog about the site's inner workings, including a recent video of them goofing around with a dead rat caught in the office.

Venture capitalists gave more than $38 million to Facebook, a college community site run by a 22-year-old CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. When a USA TODAY reporter recently called Zuckerberg a businessman, he burst out laughing. "I don't think anyone's ever said that to me before," he said.

And Valley darling Google has more than 600 types of jobs open at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. The search giant, which officially launched in 1999, also offers bubble-like perks such as free meals prepared by a high-end chef, a staff doctor and onsite car wash. (The company also has a market capitalization of about $116 billion, which is higher than that of PepsiCo, Home Depot or Genentech.)

The largesse is starting to spill into the local economy. "We see a whole lot of money flowing out here right now," says Ginny Cain McMurtrie, a vice president at Saratoga, Calif.-based Alain Pinel Realtors.

In the first quarter of 2006, 82 homes were sold for more than $2.5 million in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, the real estate firm says.

"I hear the agents talking about the Googlers and eBayers looking at $3 million houses," Cain McMurtrie says. A home in the tech-executive hamlet of Woodside recently sold for $10.3 million.

That's a striking contrast to the rest of the country, where a softening market has caused the median home price to nearly flatten at about $230,000, says the National Association of Realtors.

Commercial real estate is seeing growth, too. Real estate firm Brandenburg Properties recently offered to rent a 55,000-square-foot office building in Santa Clara to one or more start-ups in exchange for an equity position in the companies. Brandenburg received several proposals but pulled the offer when Yahoo began buying up office space in the neighborhood.

"I wouldn't say there's stellar demand (for office space), but there's unquestionably growing demand," says partner Bill Baron.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini, speaking at a recent party thrown by the No. 1 chipmaker, said he, too, has noticed an upturn in the economy. But he's not worried, because boom and bust cycles are a natural part of tech, he said. The industry will be fine "unless there's a major economic change," he said. Then he wandered off to sample the party's swanky Asian cuisine.

Upfront investments

One reason for the economic swings is that some fundamental tech products require huge upfront investments.

A semiconductor factory requires billions of dollars and several years to build. Thus, a factory planned during good times often isn't ready until the economy softens. Then it floods the market with new chips, causing prices and profits to fall.

Yet even seasoned veterans such as Cisco's Chambers were stunned by the dot-com bust, which caused the tech-heavy Nasdaq stock exchange to lose 78% of its value in just over two years.

Janet Yellen, president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, says she doesn't believe that type of collapse looms. "I'm not so concerned about a bubble," she says. "Some venture-capital money is coming back into the tech sector ... (but) nothing like the amount that we had during the dot-com phase."

Indeed, it seems as if most of the excitement is limited to the tech-centric area around San Francisco.

J.P. Auffret, a professor at George Mason University in Virginia, says the only tech buzz he's noticed recently is an increase in Silicon Valley job postings. Few of his colleagues are interested, he says. "There's a more rational view on opportunity and risks. And there's the perception that it's quite expensive to live there."

Author Carr says the Valley's highs and lows will level out as the tech industry matures. After all, the PC is 25 years old, and the Internet is 13. "The really rapid growth stage of the tech industry is behind us," he says. "It's beginning to look like any other manufacturing industry."

Stability in maturity

And it's easy to forget that the tech industry has grown steadily since hitting bottom in 2001. While the industry is still far below its dot-com-era highs, a five-year growth spurt is a kind of quiet boom.

"Before you know it, the glory days will have already happened," says Su-Ming Wong, managing director of Champ Ventures in Sydney.

But Wong says tech will always bounce back, and Silicon Valley will likely remain at the heart of the industry. "Despite every country's best efforts, no one ... has successfully replicated the Valley, and I doubt it can ever be done," he says.

That's what Valley entrepreneurs want to hear. Most of the time.

"People are having fun, but less fun than you'd think," Renkoo's Park says. "Because the way it works in the Valley is: When things are good, you work 24/7. When you get laid off — when everything tanks — is when you have time to spend with your friends."

Contributing: Janet Kornblum

Dabble got a mention in India's The Hindu (India's National Newspaper).

Tracking on-line video content

Dabble (http://www.dabble.com/), the video search service that indexes a multitude of video hosting services such as Dailymotion, Ourmedia, YouTube and so on is another excellent tool for identifying video content.

Hey even GQ/Details online knows Dabble is the place to be :-)

WEB: The hunt for the latest celebrity sex tape just got easier, thanks to Dabble.com, a just-launched clearinghouse for more than 240 Web video sites (including Google Video, YouTube, ClipShack, etc.).

The SF Chronicle did a roundup of cool web 2.0 sites, and we made it!

It's by Dan Fost and Ellen Lee.

Dabble

Web address: www.dabble.com

Where they are: Berkeley

What they do: A TV Guide for Internet video, the site lets users tag and rate clips found throughout the Web. Viewers form communities based on their interests, helping sort the Web's top videos on such topics as baking a dessert and Japanese animation.

The skinny: Even before the company's premiere, Dabble Chief Executive Officer Mary Hodder was quoted in Newsweek and featured in a series of technology conferences. Now it must prove that it can easily help users find the gems without wading through all the junk on the Internet.

The competition: Though it counts YouTube and other online video sites as its partners, it also competes with them for attention in this crowded and popular space.

Here is the full text of the entire article, in case the link goes bad:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/28/BUG32KOH9R1.DTL

San Francisco Chronicle
COOL WEB 2.0 SITES

Dan Fost and Ellen Lee, Chronicle Staff Writers

COOL WEB 2.0 SITES
08/28/2006

Flickr founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake made the cover of Newsweek for their popular photo-sharing site. Digg founder Kevin Rose made the cover of BusinessWeek after his news-ranking site took off. Online video hub YouTube is ubiquitous, while social networking giants MySpace and Facebook are in everyone's faces.

OK, we get it. Web 2.0 is a big deal.

[Podcast: Benny Evangelista with Phil Leigh on Apple settlement; Ellen Lee on cool 2.0 sites; Web-based word processing programs; and protecting laptop data.]

But what about the Web 2.0 companies that haven't made the cover of a magazine?

This is their week. The Chronicle today highlights some of the startups from this hot sector of the tech world -- companies that fulfill the Web 2.0 philosophy of community, sharing and user-created content, and that fit in the modern gestalt with things like video, music and digital photos.

The only real requirement is that the companies are something you probably haven't heard of before. And if you have, consider yourself hip. Debbie Landa, chief executive officer of the IBDNetwork, which runs the Under the Radar conference, says, "I'm definitely jaded because I know most of these really well."

This survey is far from scientific. Many intriguing companies did not make the list, including FareCast, which tells you when the airline ticket you want to buy is likely to go up or down in price, and Vyew, a utility (like Google's Writely) that lets you collaborate with someone online, and -- well, a list like that might never end.

In the first quarter of this year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, 134 Web 2.0 companies received $869 million in venture funding, on pace to beat the $3 billion that 465 firms raked in last year. And that's just the companies taking funding. Much of Web 2.0's appeal is that engineers can start firms in their basements.

So next year, check those magazine covers for the companies on The Chronicle's list. These guys are growing.
StumbleUpon

Web address: www.stumbleupon.com

Where they are: San Francisco

What they do: A free, downloadable browser button that lets people rate and recommend random Web sites to their friends as they "stumble" around the Internet.

The skinny: Three guys from Calgary, Alberta, developed the software and moved to San Francisco this year. They have $2 million in funding from some big Net names, including Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, Google board member Ram Shriram and famed angel Ron Conway.

The competition: Anyone who leads a Net surfer to something interesting. One could say competitors range from the news-ranking site Digg, Netscape and other news sites built on user ratings, to Google and Yahoo and other search giants.
Imeem

Web address: www.imeem.com

Where they are: Palo Alto

What they do: Users participate by joining online communities, called meems, or creating private meems where they can share music, video, photos, comments and blogs with their friends. It also rolls in instant messaging.

The skinny: Founder Jan Jannick came from the original Napster, as did many of Napster's engineers. In three months, its audience has grown from 50,000 to 800,000, though still less than the millions that congregate on MySpace.

The competition: It faces an uphill battle against other social networking and online community sites, such as the original and newly cash-infused Friendster, Tagworld, Bebo and South Korea's Cyworld. And of course the biggest and baddest of them all, MySpace and Facebook.
Slide

Web address: www.slide.com

Where they are: San Francisco

What they do: It's a toolbar that sits on your desktop as photos slide by, fed from whatever site you fancy -- whether it's your friends' Flickr feeds, or things you want to buy on eBay.

The skinny: Founded by Max Levchin, who struck it rich in his 20s when he co-founded PayPal and sold it to eBay, Slide attempts to organize the sprawling information of the Internet. It's a neat gadget but a crowded field. Net-watchers say Levchin's work ethic, to say nothing of his stellar track record and computing expertise, may give him an edge.

The competition: RockYou, which purportedly has a larger following, and FilmLoop, which has had more exposure.
Meebo

Web address: www.meebo.com

Where they are: San Francisco

What they do: Instead of downloading popular instant messaging services such as Yahoo Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger, Meebo lets you access your buddy list and IM all you want from its Web site.

The skinny: Backers include Sequoia Capital, the same folks that invested in Google, PayPal and YouTube.

The competition: Instant messaging services from AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Skype and others, as well as copycats such as KoolIM.
popURLs

Web address: www.popurls.com

Where they are: Austria

What they do: Popurls aggregates content from the Web's most popular social sites, so you can see in one fell swoop the hottest stories from Digg, the most popular photos from Flickr, the latest bookmarks on Del.icio.us, the most watched videos from YouTube, and other sites.

The skinny: Thomas Marban, who produced the site, says on his blog that he started it in March, and is now in the top 50 sites bookmarked on Del.icio.us.

The competition: NetVibes, founded by some Parisians, does something similar, including even your Google e-mail and allowing you to add other sites to the tracker. Microsoft and other tech giants have similar products in the works.
Dabble

Web address: www.dabble.com

Where they are: Berkeley

What they do: A TV Guide for Internet video, the site lets users tag and rate clips found throughout the Web. Viewers form communities based on their interests, helping sort the Web's top videos on such topics as baking a dessert and Japanese animation.

The skinny: Even before the company's premiere, Dabble Chief Executive Officer Mary Hodder was quoted in Newsweek and featured in a series of technology conferences. Now it must prove that it can easily help users find the gems without wading through all the junk on the Internet.

The competition: Though it counts YouTube and other online video sites as its partners, it also competes with them for attention in this crowded and popular space.
Pandora

Web address: www.pandora.com

Where they are: Oakland

What they do: Your personal Internet radio station.

The skinny: "I love Pandora. It's potential is limitless," said Kevin Smokler, a San Francisco author and blogger (and, he discloses, a friend of Pandora founder Tim Westergren). "For what it does, it's pretty damn great. Pandora creates a radio station based on collaborative filtering based on your musical preferences. There's more music than you can categorize. It's pretty great at exposing you to new things. It's the best window I have into the Web 2.0 idea that music is an endless garden of varietals you can just pluck from."

The competition: Many other Web sites are in the music game, from iTunes on down. "Pandora is cool, but Last.fm is more 'Web2.0' in the conventional sense of participation," says Garrett Camp, one of the founders of StumbleUpon. "Pandora is expert/algorithmically driven, whereas Last.fm is user driven."
Twitter

Web address: www.twitter.com

Where they are: San Francisco

What they do: A text messaging service that lets people send notes to groups. "You can send something to one number and it's distributed to other people," said Ryan Freitas, an interaction designer at Adaptive Path in San Francisco. "It tells people where you are. It's kind of like microblogging. It's really a lot of fun. Part of Web 2.0 is that it's fun and it's a utility combined with one another, so people enjoy what they're doing while they're getting something out of it."

The skinny: Founded by the team behind Odeo, a podcasting company in San Francisco's South Park (which is led by Evan Williams, who founded Blogger and sold it to Google).

The competition: Google bought Dodgeball, and many of the big cell phone companies are looking to add different messaging features to their menu of services.
Eyespot

Web address: www.eyespot.com

Where they are: San Diego

What they do: Upload your video to Eyespot and use its tools to edit it and publish it on other sites.

The skinny: Eyespot ranks among the top video editing sites, according to trade publications and analysts, tapping into the popular pastime of mixing and mashing video clips.

The competition: Software programs such as Apple's iMovie offer more whiz-bang features. Then there's Palo Alto's One True Media, which also makes it simple for users to create and edit music montages of photos and videos on the Web, then post them online. It also competes against San Francisco's VideoEgg, another site that make it easy for users to edit and publish videos on other sites.
Songbird

Web address: www.songbirdnest.com

Where they are: San Francisco

What they do: Download Songbird to play music from a host of sources.

The skinny: Called the potential "iTunes killer," Songbird was developed by the same people who created Winamp and the basis for Yahoo Music.

The competition: Apple's iTunes dominates the digital music sphere. And there are Web 2.0 sites that aren't the same as Songbird, but are also focused on music, such as MOG, a new MySpace-like site that helps users find fellow Black Sabbath aficionados, and La La, which also helps music lovers find those with similar tastes and swap CDs. And did we mention iTunes?
Revver

Web address: www.revver.com

Where they are: Los Angeles

What they do: Online video site.

The skinny: Revver helped make the "Mentos guys" $30,000 in shared advertising revenues and made them famous to boot. Now the Mentos guys have gotten an infusion of Mentos from the candymaker for future Mentos and Coke experiments. Oh, and Revver has attracted more viewers.

The competition: Too many to count. At the top are YouTube and MySpace, not to mention JumpCut, Fliqz, Veoh, Blip.tv, Guba, GoFish, vMix, Vidilife, iFilm, Panjea, Metacafe, Google, Yahoo, AOL and specialized sites such as Break.com aimed at young men.

E-mail the writers at dfost@sfchronicle.com and elee@sfchronicle.com.

By for Abram Sauer for Brandchannel for Businessweek. (Yeah, I don't the relationship between brandchannel and business week either.)

YouTube's own challengers are advancing at a rapid rate. AOL is re-engineering its video site to mirror YouTube's success, and CNN is launching CNN Exchange, which will house user-contributed video features. Then there are sites like Eefoof.com, Panjea.com, Revver and Blip.TV, which share up to 50 percent of ad page revenue with the creator of the videos. Others like Dabble.com (currently in beta) sort through all video hosting sites (like YouTube and its competition) for search content, while specialty video sites like Pornotube concentrate on one point of interest.

Here is the complete text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/aug2006/id20060815_988423.htm?campaign_id=bier_innutt

You Tube - Me Watch
Is the rapidly growing video hosting site in danger of being eclipsed by rapidly growing imitators?

Rapid growth, consumer control, hyper word-of-mouth promotion, hungry competitors. Welcome to YouTube's world.

For the uninitiated, YouTube is an online portal through which users can watch and share video content. Currently, it is not just a video site, it is the video site. It has achieved such status so rapidly that it seems fair to wonder where the service will go from here.

Founded in a garage in February 2005, YouTube officially launched to the world in December of that year. Popular media mentions helped the brand rocket to the upper echelons of online pronoun properties with names featuring "I," "Me," "My," and "You."

How high, how rapid? In the month of June, Nielsen/NetRatings data show that YouTube logged 19.6 million unique users; this represents a nearly 300 percent increase from January user-ship. And there appears to be no such thing as a summer lull. For the week of July 9, Nielsen reported 12.8 million unique viewers, up 75 percent from the previous week. That particular week, nearly half of all "Most Viewed" clips were of the 2006 World Cup Zidane "header." Some were recorded TV coverage, but many were user-created original videos such as Zidane head-butt compilation. (Warning: Clicking on the link may lead to countless wasted hours.)

User-created content is at the center of YouTube's web-2.0 pedigree: the idea that the "new" fluid Internet model will be based on user interaction and contribution. But, similar to blogs, copyrighted material is feeding YouTube's success. Copyrighted material for which YouTube does not own the rights. This puts YouTube in a tricky position for the possibility of selling out and compromises its ability to make money through advertising.

Buying out YouTube could put an established media (or other) investor at risk for lawsuits from competing media companies about hosting their content (currently not as big an issue given YouTube's neutrality.)

Advertising could be YouTube's means to profitability. Already, American television network NBC has inked a deal with the site to promote its shows (seen recently in advertising for the film "Pirates of the Caribbean"). But advertisers could seek to interfere with content when it runs counter to their own objectives. Currently it's not clear how much advertising the brand owners are willing to tolerate anyway. Earlier this year, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley said in an interview with CNN Money, "We're going to sell sponsorships and direct advertisements. But we are building a community, and we don't want to bombard people with advertising" (May 11, 2006).

This idea of "community," plus the site's reliance on copyrighted material, puts YouTube in a very interesting position as a brand. In the conventional sense, a brand is owned by two groups, the brand owner and the brand consumer. The "brand" is where the owner's desires and the users' perceptions meet. In YouTube's case, there are three brand owners. As in the conventional case, YouTube's actions and communications converge with the audience's perception to create the YouTube "brand." The third element is the copyright owners, who have realized that they can leverage YouTube to create interest in their properties, but are quick to pull content if it is not to their liking. YouTube has to manage its brand based on consumer perception, but it doesn't completely control its own product.

An added difficulty for YouTube is that it is lacking an emotional hook to differentiate itself from a pure functional service (think iPod). Users visit YouTube not based on any of the brand's perceived values, but on its ability to give them what they want, when and how they want it. The service offering can easily be replicated elsewhere, better. Online social network Friendster suffered from this and subsequently lost its dominance to MySpace.

YouTube's own challengers are advancing at a rapid rate. AOL is re-engineering its video site to mirror YouTube's success, and CNN is launching CNN Exchange, which will house user-contributed video features. Then there are sites like Eefoof.com, Panjea.com, Revver and Blip.TV, which share up to 50 percent of ad page revenue with the creator of the videos. Others like Dabble.com (currently in beta) sort through all video hosting sites (like YouTube and its competition) for search content, while specialty video sites like Pornotube concentrate on one point of interest.

If YouTube could be said to have a brand position, it might be one of selfless populism. Even if the site's ultimate goal is to make money, the user perception is that it is a power-to-the-people portal through which a community serves each other and the little guy can share and watch for free. Meanwhile, competitor Eefoof's tagline is "Make it. Post it. Profit!" The placement of the one exclamation mark sets a position that the contributor is motivated by more than just an altruistic sense of community.

With a potentially crippling copyright lawsuit on the horizon, it's almost impossible not to compare YouTube to Napster. It's easy to see a future in which YouTube will exist as a brand in recovery, scrapping for survival in a flooded marketplace it basically built. Its very name forever attached to a very short era.

SF Gate did a little ditty on the video hosting scene (that we're vigorously tracking at Dabble) and how it looks like some of the smaller hosts might start consolidating soon.

Dabble, of course, isn't a hosting service, we're a video searching/social networking site that can help you find video across all hosters.

Here are some quotes from Ellen Lee's article. Funny how she first talks about companies "dabbling" in video, then goes on to actually talk about Dabble.

By one count, about 240 sites now dabble in online video. And chances are many won't survive the next year. Some will simply shut down; others likely will be gobbled up by larger companies...

Dabble, a Berkeley startup, plans to start its online video search site this week. It lets users search for and collect video from other sites on a personal page; members can also join communities on topics such as cooking, where they help identify the best the Web has to offer on cooking-related videos.

For several months, as part of the database it's building, Dabble has been tracking the growing number of online video sites, which by its count has reached nearly 240.

Not all will last, said Dabble founder Mary Hodder. But if cable and satellite television can have more than 200 channels, Hodder said, why can't the Internet? And why can't there be something like Dabble to act as a TV Guide for the Web? (Incidentally, TV Guide offers an editorial guide online on the latest, most entertaining video clips and shows on the Web, though it's mainly focused on traditional Hollywood fare from Lifetime, Comedy Central, Disney and others.)

"When you turn on your TV, do you just go to NBC?" Hodder said. "If (the online video sites) are creative and provide different services, then they can end up thriving."