Written By Sepideh Saremi | November 8, 2007 | Share This |

Oprah Winfrey launched her own YouTube channel last week, and the talk-show host’s YouTube-themed television show that aired this week - complete with YouTube founders, YouTube skateboarding dog, and YouTube cell-phone-salesman-turned-opera-singer - undoubtedly also served as a vehicle to publicize her entry into social media. AdAge noted this marks the biggest content partnership Oprah has ever formed:

The Oprah channel represents the largest external media partnership Ms. Winfrey has entered for her content; she already hosts a comprehensive archive of show clips on her own website, dating back to 1999. Tim Bennett, president of Harpo Productions, described the YouTube relationship as more of a social-networking play.

“It provides another platform for people online to communicate with us and share in some of the one-of-a-kind experiences that occur behind-the-scenes at ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show,’” he said.

Broadcasting & Cable also stressed community-building in its coverage of the channel:

According to Harpo, one of the goals in creating the channel is to create a community around the program. By utilizing the already well established YouTube community, the hope is that interest in the show would increase, and fans would show more engagement.

Oprah’s channel, which already has more than 19,000 subscribers and more than 400,000 views, will include behind-the-scenes clips, she explains in her message to YouTube. But her channel moderates comments and disables embedding, so users can only share links and can’t place videos on their own sites.

Moderated comments are understandable, but disabled embedding of videos in a venture that’s supposed to be about community building and social networking, on a site that is successful largely because it allows its users to spread content virally? That’s not too smart, but it’s also not surprising: its insularity reeks of old-school, television-model thinking. Virginia Heffernan has a great post poking fun at the whole thing. She writes:

. . ..she’s moderating the comments section and preventing embeds …

(‘‘Hey, you said we don’t do that over here, Dad — ’’ ‘‘Shut up and smile, kid. THAT IS OPRAH WINFREY.’’)

Granted, Oprah’s not the only publisher to have opted for draconian content lock-down on YouTube - BBC Worldwide also forbids YouTube embedding. But the problem is that Oprah is also purporting that she wants to create a community, and disallowing embeds makes that effort seem really disingenuous. Essentially, it’s telling users that she deigns to participate on YouTube and wants to hear their feedback (and probably eventually incorporate their videos) only as long as she gets to keep a choke-hold on how and where users can do that.

There are no ads on the Oprah YouTube channel page yet, so I’m not sure how this strategy of locking users on the page benefits her. Even if/when ads are implemented, I’m sure Team Harpo has no lack of opportunity to monetize, whether that’s on-page or with super-short pre-roll in each clip (ensuring that even embedded videos would bring dollars back to Harpo coffers). In any case, to fully engage with the YouTube audience, even Oprah should play by YouTube rules: letting the content go where it wants to go.

Topics: Media Convergence, Online Video, Social Media |