I couldn’t get enough vitriol to post this in the pit, but something about this does not sit well with me. Why does Oprah feel the need to post vlogs on Youtube? It seems like something lifted out of the plot of a South Park episode. Or like a group of professional athletes playing on an amateur league team.
This would be cool if it was Oprah sitting in front of a webcam ranting about her random interests and called herself “readergrrrl286” or something, everyone would know it was Oprah but she would never explicitly confirm or deny it. Now that would be cool and classy.
She even snickers a little bit on her “Oprah’s Message to Youtube” video when she says something like, “I’ve hosted my own show for . . . oh what . . . 22 years now modest as hell. But I’m proud snicker to now have my own Youtube channel”
She’s having someone pre-read comments on her site to be “approved” before posting. That doesn’t sit well with me either. Is she afraid of criticism? Many many vidoes have plenty of haters and mouth-drooling idiots posting terrible things, but aren’t so cowardly to disable the comments.
The disclaimer on her channel reads: " . . . due to the number of comments received, only selected comments will be posted at the discretion of the channel manager."
What the hell does the number of comments matter? It isn’t like Oprah needs to respond personally to each one. Some individual videos have more than 100,000 comments. She just doesn’t want criticism, the coward.
I hope this proves to be, at best, a marginal success and it proves that this sort of exposure is not really worth the extra effort.
Frankly, I will never understand the bile against Oprah. So she’s decided to expand her media empire or whatever you want to call it to Youtube. So what? Apparently she and her people have decided it would be best to moderate comments. Maybe it is to prevent valid criticism, maybe it’s to delete inane and inappropriate posts (have you read Youtube comments? How quickly would some asshole write racial remarks on an Oprah Youtube channel?) or, most likely, a combination of the two. There’s no requirement on Youtube that you have to post or accept all comments, so what. Seems like a perfectly good decision by her.
I don’t love her or hate her either. I would have the same reaction if Steven Spielberg suddenly decided to start producing videos for YouTube.
There is competition on YouTube for viewers and subscribers and some people who started out on YouTube have now gotten a start in film and video production professionally. If big studios suddenly become interested in producing videos and films on a video blogging site in the wake of Oprah’s experiment how much less likely will that be happen in the future. All the attention will be on the big productions and nobody will care about the guy who spends hours carefully editing his homemade movie.
Yes, users are allowed to disable comments, and yes I have read YouTube comments they are notoriously stupid. If this is such a concern then maybe it isn’t a suitable forum for Oprah.
I’m not sure how it is in general, but in the YouTube community I tend to interact with it is considered bad form to disable or delete comments. It looks weak.
That would be really cool. Aw. She should have done that.
Have you ever been on Youtube? It’d be ridiculous for her not to screen them. I’m not sure what value you think comments like “go to HELL fat ni99er biiiiitcchh!!!” would add to the experience. Why should it offend you to have such comments disallowed? If Youtube gives you the option of screening comments, then that’s the forum for her.
What’s with her? She has a website, a daily TV show, an after-show on Bravo or WE or somewhere, and a monthly magazine with her picture on every cover. Does she think we can’t get enough of her? Or does she just have too much energy and enthusiasm to be contained?
She can do what she wants with her time and her money, but I’m sick of her. I think it was her pimping The Secret that did it. And her fawning TV audience.
Comments of that nature tend to get shouted down fairly quickly by other users, and I would necessairly expect Oprah’s minions to immediately do just that. Again, this is why YouTube may not be an appropriate forum for her. She’s get flamed to the end of the Earth if she didn’t have the power to pick and choose who gets heard and who doesn’t.
This is less about Oprah than it is about the nature of YouTube. It is a place where, with a webcam and an internet connection former nobody’s could become modestly famous overnight. If this starts a landslide of professional production companies drowning out everybody else I think that is a loss.
In my OP I said that I hope that this is a modest success at best and not worth the time overall, but if Oprah can find a way to start making greater heaps of money over YouTube others will be certain to follow. I hope not but I think that someday we may wax nostalgic about the days when YouTube was a chaotic free for all as opposed to Network Television Version 2.0.
No, it isn’t. Well, yes it is, but that’s more by accident then by design. What it is is a web business. The folks that run it are interested in making money, and attracting folks like Oprah to create content exclusively for YouTube is the jackpot they are looking for.
Yeah, you are correct. Can’t argue with that. It was the folks who spent countless hours posting videos that made it what it is. Time magazine gave the person of the year to “You” for that very reason.