If you haven’t realized yet that online video is a force to be reckoned with… check out this graph from a recent report by Hitwise.
During the week of February 3, YouTube’s traffic surged above the combined traffic to all of the television network websites. [emphasis mine]
I find this amazing – especially because, in general, I find YouTube saturated with a ton of garbage and weighed down by terrible navigation. Furthermore, their site wide search is basically unusable – unless I have the exact URL of what I want to watch, trying to find content on YouTube is next to impossible. (This is something I’m hoping their partnership with Google will fix shortly.)
Nevertheless, those traffic numbers don’t lie and this an impressive statistic.
One way YouTube can fix this situation is to to silo their videos into different channels. Not unlike how a traditional cable provider does really. And they’ve already begun to do this, like the deals they’ve made with NBC and the
National Hockey League (Go ‘Nucks!).
So it begs the question then, who will be the first to roll out a real estate video portal on YouTube?
Existing real estate video sites like RealEstateChannel.ca are a natural, more polished evolution of the homes channels you often see high up on the cable dial of your local cable provider. But they don’t even come close to offering the potential reach that YouTube does.
It seems to me that any of the Realogy brands (Coldwell Banker, Century 21, Sotheby’s etc.) might have the cachet (and deep pocketbooks) to pull this off. RealLiving would be a good candidate too – it shouldn’t be too hard to repurpose the videos they’re having produced by MLPodcast (see Real Estate Video is Here to Stay, Video Podcasting Maybe) so they could fed into a branded YouTube page.
The secret to creating a successful real estate video portal will be to make sure the videos are placed in the proper geographical context (state, county, neighborhood) and figuring out a way to present viewers with the most relevant videos to them individually (i.e. extensive filtering options).
For more on this, read The User As The Center Of The Universe: Integration Of Real Estate Video And Geolocation by For Sale By Locals
