Cory Doctorow nails it:
Content isn’t king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends — if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.
Or, if you could choose between your portable DVD player and a mobile phone…?
I think conversation is also the biggest difference between YouTube and GoogleVideo. Eventually Google had to buy YouTube to get into that conversation.
eirikso 
[…] IÂ found this to be very inspiring. […]
I think this is a fair point. But as Jakob Nielsen show here, most still just want to watch.
What separate YouTube from Google is that they made an attractive environment for those contributers who do make the better content. These people prefer the dialogue with other active users that only YouTube can accomodate.
Most people on the other hand still could’nt care less about the community part of YouTube as long as they get their funny clips and are able to share them with their friends.
I guess that’s right, but the one percent that are active and contribute are very often the first users and important to spread the word. They are the ones that get websites like these well known so the “lurkers” start using it…
If I’d the choice to bring movies or friends to a lonely island, I’d bring the movies – I *like* my friends and would not want them stuck on some nowhere island.
I think another thing that separated google video and youtube was how easy youtube made it to share their videos. Via email and on other web sites. If content providers should learn one lesson from this “raise of youtube” it is to make their content available as easy as possible and to let people share it between them. When trying new content providers you trust your friends more than any ad campaign.