facebooks are actual books full of student pictures that many colleges and universities still create.
I thought it was because the vids are called youts, and, as the saying goes, “Yout will be served.”
You and tube both have the same vowel sound. It’s not quite a rhyme but they fit together much better then your tube.
Brand names should roll off the tongue. While YouTube isn’t the best name in the world, I never questioned its origins, or what it “means”.
It sounds like the beginning of “you too” for one. When “tube” kicks in, it seems apparent to me the site is an inclusive video sharing site.
I disagree it’s a bad name, and might actually be on the side that it’s a good name. They could’ve gone “uTube”, playing off the lowercase vowel/Noun thing that is all the rage at Apple, still, and seemed par for the course for upstart internet companies in the 90s.
Despite the fact that YourTube doesn’t quite “ring”, they weren’t playing off the possessive or adding an adjective to “tube”, but rather point to the singular or even plural pronoun of You. It seems more collective that way.
Whoa. That was way too much analyzing for a site name.
Youtube should not be YourTube for the same reason MTV does not stand for Music’s TV.
A good brand name doesn’t have to make sense. It has to roll off the tongue and be memorable.
YouTube is a great brand name.
Most of those are terrible, and make it sound like it’s a video chat site.
Same thing with Vimeo: a play off the word “video”, by replacing the ‘d’ with an ‘m’, you get a pleasant and memorable word, with the pronoun “me” in it.
But it’s a name, not a phrase.
“Youtube” uses the same vowel sound twice; it sounds far, far better than “yourtube.”
It’s better than “vimeo”
Edit: D’oh! cmyk beat me to it.
'Cuz it’s got a great theme song.
You…Tube…dot…com
You’ll find the whole world for what you’re lookin’ for
You…Tube…dot…com
It’s a blessing for mankind, that’s for sure
Once we were couch potatoes, now we are YouTubers…
At least when we were all passive consumers of Big Media, we were united in some meaningful way.
Now what unites us? Cats. A non-verbal civilization that will crap in a toilet, and will flush a toilet - but refuses to doboth.
What a precious cosmic joke on humanity.
Sure you could look at it like that or even better why not take the time to look at some of the talent that has surfaced because of the site. While I agree that the majority of the site is time-wasting, it does have positives as well.
Yeah, whatever happened to Youtube, anyway?
You’re all missing the point. The name YouTube reflects the topologyof the internet.
I notice that the OP doesn’t actually suggest a single better alternative
Checking on archive.org:
vnet.com has been around since 1998
flicknet.com 2001
netvits.com 2001
camshare.com 2001
netcam.com 1997
mycam.com 2003
It’s debatable whether those names would have been better than youtube.com. But it doesn’t matter, since they weren’t available.
As far as I can tell, there are only two requirements for a good domain name.
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It has to be the most obvious spelling of the sounds you hear, because people hear domain names without seeing the spelling quite a lot, and having to spell them out is a drag. You can get away with maybe one creative misspelling, especially if the domain is otherwise dictionary words (e.g. netflix, flickr). That’s why “Google” is better than “Googol”, and why a domain like, say, “yootoob.com” would be really terrible.
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It has to be easily trademarked, and not just a generic description. While domains like “cars.com” and “auction.com” seem at first like they might be really great, they’re only so-so. Most people don’t use the address as a bad search engine anymore, you can’t build a brand on those domains.
That’s it. The words or sounds don’t have to relate even remotely to the business. Amazon and Apple have nothing to do with rivers or fruit (respectively), but they’re very effective domain names.
Wow, talk about a case of non-branding! Sounds like he just got lucky and it was kind of a mysterious and catchy URL. Otherwise, it sucks balls; you’d have thought he’d have had the sense to name it “E-auction” or something remotely descriptive.
Does “YouTube” sound like “yootoob” in American English? I’d spell it phonetically as “yoo-tyoob”.
This is wha we all sound funneh to each otha.