Vevo: First Thoughts

So Google and the music industry have teamed up to create Vevo, which aims to corral all music videos into a separate part of YouTube where they will be monetized by higher quality (and higher cost) video advertising.

Vevo launched last night and I spent some time on it this morning. At first look, I'm not sure I get this thing.

The first thing I did is search for Arctic Monkeys and I get a response that there are no results for that term.

Second thing I did is click on the link to Kid Cudi and watch the Pursuit Of Happiness video. But before I could watch that I had to sit through a 15 second AT&T pre-roll. That's not a great experience. I wonder if people will really sit through a 15 second pre-roll to watch a music video.

Then I went to YouTube and did a search for Kid Cudi Pursuit Of Happiness. The video I saw on Vevo is absolutely not on YouTube, but there are plenty of Pursuit Of Happiness videos there to watch including a really cool Steve Aoki remix.

Then I went to Google and did a search on Kid Cudi Pursuit Of Happiness and there are links to a bunch of videos on YouTube and MTV.com but no links to Vevo.

It's probably that Vevo is not completely rolled out yet but it would seem to me that for it to be successful, the Vevo videos will have to show up in YouTube and Google search results. And they don't right now.

It is absolutely true that for many, YouTube is their streaming music service. There is so much music on YouTube. You can get a result for most any song you look for. So it makes sense that the music industry is trying to get its arms around this new form of music discovery and listening.

But I wonder if cordoning off the "official" music videos into a separate site will achieve this goal. We'll see. I'm not that optimistic about this one.