Artists and others are using the online resource for more than just home videos
By Kinsee Morlan - Published in CityBeat 8.20.08

The biggest video-sharing website isn't just for lame home videos or amateur soft-core porn anymore: Local artists are using it as a new medium for what they're calling "X-stream Dadaism." Local businesses and nonprofits are using it as a mass marketing tool, and other local YouTubers are documenting some pretty interesting things. Our time online looking through video after video has us convinced that there's a bit of a YouTube evolution going on in Internet land.

Artists aren't the only ones finding creative new ways to use YouTube. A YouTube spokesperson says people are watching hundreds of millions of videos a day and uploading an average of 13 hours of video every minute. The spokesperson said that, as of early spring 2008, YouTube had the sixth largest audience on the Internet in the U.S., with 200 million unique users visiting the site every month. And those numbers aren't lost on businesses and corporations looking to target a younger, more Internet-savvy crowd.

A quick search through San Diego's YouTube community leads to just a few evolved users contributing worthwhile original content.

[A] local group making potentially mind-blowing videos is SceneDiego, an improv group that does performances and pranks in public places. They film all their stunts in order to keep a record of their work and to reach a much larger audience.

"We put a lot of work into planning these things and the people's reactions," says Agent Neil, aka Andy, group founder. "We get a sense of happiness and laughter during the mission, but by sharing them [on YouTube], it gives them an entire second life, and people who weren't there get to experience it."

Andy uploads more content than the average YouTube user, and, as he reticently admits, he probably consumes more than the average amount of YouTube, too.

"This is kind of embarrassing," he says. "I just bought an Apple TV. Do you know what that is? It's kind of like an Internet cable box that you use with your TV, so I actually cancelled my cable, and with this thing you can watch any YouTube video and you can download any television show you want to watch through the iTunes store. So, a couple nights I've got home from work and just got sucked into YouTube, because you sit on your couch, and you're watching YouTube with the remote and the big TV, you know, and it's a much different experience than watching them on your computer screen. I do watch a good amount of YouTube, I guess."

[This is not the full article, if you wish to read that, you can do that here: http://www.sdcitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/youtube_evolution/7214/]