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In December 2011 after spending a cool $100 million in redesign, You Tube became ‘Google Tube’. The new avatar is not about ‘you and me’ the popular user generated video site anymore, but is an half baked amalgamation of poor and limited content from 100 odd ‘Google You Tube partners’ from Disney to Jay Z’s Life and Times. The short video’s put up by the Google’s You Tube partner channels are simply too few. Besides they lack the depth to compete with the previous free format user generated content that was slowly becoming the social media hub for video making and a platform that encouraged amateurs to create content. Google feels that the You Tube content will be a new generation competitor to Television.

However current day Television is far ahead of the Google dream and has adequate professional content.

You tube users are up in arms with the December design changes in the web site. As per New York Times Google’s own video explaining the changes received over 15,000 dislikes as against 5000 likes within a month, showing that it is been a rather unpopular design change. Several You Tube boycott movements are becoming popular as social media amateur protests are gaining momentum. By comparison, the changes made by Google, less than a year ago in Jan 2011 to improve the You Tube features had come up with fewer objections and a guarded but positive user feedback.

You Tube channel partners are creating original short form videos at the rate of less than a 1000 short video’s or 5000 video minutes a month which is grossly inadequate. This is less than 1% of the current popular amateur videos that are on You Tube and there are many more which have considerable content depth though they are not so popular. Hence the new layout that puts the channel partners on the centre spread show repetitive content that push up Google’s pay per click ad revenue model but does little to satisfy user palate .

Besides it relegates the user choice an ‘share and favorite features’ to the background and removes several popular options that has angered YouTube users. Though the protest has been widespread and the new format has been critiqued by the established media such as Reuters and PC World, Google has not withdrawn its current avatar. It remains to be seen what happens to the You Tube ‘page views’ during the first quarter of 2012 after which Google is expected to react.