Join the video revolution! It's YouTube! (youtube.com)

Member Name: Escorcio

Product:	youtube.com
Date:	03/10/09 (13 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great video content and online community

Disadvantages: Hard to earn money from videos

YouTube is the largest video sharing site on the web allowing you to upload your latest videos while being part of a great online community.

YouTube is now owned by Google which makes the most of it's powerful search engine tools to find the right video you are looking for. Searching does bring up auto-complete results based on what others have searched which speeds up the searching process too.

The website itself is very easy to navigate and creates a great social environment. Using a YouTube or Google account you can have various widgets on your homepage such as Subscribers videos, recommend videos and friend's activity. As well as this you can find other popular videos using the navigational tabs. Here you get a more extensive look into YouTube's video archive within each category.

Videos themselves are displayed in 2 main formats, the standard (half page) and the larger (full page) although YouTube are now trying to convert all videos to the larger format. You also have the option to switch to HQ depending on your internet which improves the quality of the video making it more enjoyable to watch. You can also change to full screen for more immersive viewing. On the whole YouTube videos stream quite quickly but can take slightly longer when the servers are busy.

YouTube is soon to be launching YouTube XL (although you can access it's beta now) This is perfect for a simpler browsing on computers or games consoles. The newer site brings up results faster, has a simpler interface and supports larger videos.

If you create your own account you'll have your own YouTube page where you can interact with the rest of the YouTube community and upload videos. Although the upload process can take a while it doesn't take up too much bandwidth so you can be doing other things. There's also a simple progress bar with estimated times you can see how fast it's going. Once it's uploaded the quality will be improved as its process but can still be viewed commented and rated on.

If you're videos are very popular and you have a high volume of subscribers you may want to sign up to the YouTube Partner program. This allows you to not only upload videos larger than 1GB and over 10 minutes but you ca now also monetize your content. By placing ads on or next to your videos you can utilise Google AdSense to earn money on views and clicks. Unfortunately earning potential for the average YouTuber is quite low, for starters you'll need about 1,000 subscribers to become a partner and even then you'll only make considerable amounts of money if you post a video a day with 100,000's of views each. That said it can act as a little cash bonus for some.

Overall YouTube is the best video sharing website with a great community encouraging involvement and the ability to become an internet web-star. Highly recommended!

Summary: A great video sharing site that is the best around