Paris is hot. Youtube is broke.

Paris Hilton is typing up the tube, youtube that is. She has her own channel pushing her new song(s) and the show Prison Break. Here are a few highlights from the Mercurynews.com article along with my thoughts in parenthesis:

The branded content channels are similar to entertainers' pages on MySpace. But rather than making entertainers such as Britney Spears a friend, which one does on MySpace, a YouTube user can subscribe to the entertainers' videos, receiving notification when new ones have been uploaded.

(Users can subscribe to myspace blogs, which notify users when a new post has been added. If there were video embedded in that post, users can have the same experience on myspace as they can on youtube.)

"This is a first,'' said Hurley, YouTube's chief executive and co-founder. "It really allows advertisers to kick start a viral campaign.''

(Advertisers can kick start a viral campaign now, for free, and have always been able to do so. Why would they need to pay youtube for it? The proof is in the article itself:)

To understand the power of the new medium, Mark Kingdon, chief executive of Organic, a digital communications agency in San Francisco, points to one Sony commercial for a new TV, which has had more than 3 million viewers.

(Is this ad featured on it's own paid-for, branded channel on youtube? No. The ad was talked about and linked from on many top marketing and ad blogs. Instead of channels and branding, they should focus on making a fantastic product that gets people (bloggers, etc) talking...and linking.)

"Where else can advertisers get that immediate feedback? (asks Kingdon) "This starts to leverage the full potential of what is very new on the Web, which is a video community site.''

(Ok, I know I sound like a Myspace cheerleader, but myspace is already a video communty site. Using it's own video format, along with youtube and a host of others, Myspace users send and receive videos through bulletins, messages, blog posts, and plain old profiles. It's been there. Why would anyone leave myspace to go to Youtube when everyone is already on myspace? Skip the step, set up a presence on myspace for free, then use youtube to host your videos for free, then use alll the tools of myspace to get the video out there to it's users. Then, get the video onto major blogs and watch it start. The viral thing, I mean.)