I was surfing the net this morning when I saw a Google adsense ad promoting a new South African themed video sharing site called SouthAfricaTube.com. I am not sure what scares me more about the site - the fact that it does not even host its own videos, the "designed in Front Page by my cousin Dwayne in 1996" retro look, or the fact that someone would spend money advertising something like this on Google. On further investigation I managed to find Kenyatube.com and Nigeria-tube.com, all using the same code and shit design, and all with around 10 actual videos masquerading as content.
As much of a waste of time that the site is, it poses interesting questions for the nascent South African video sharing sites like Zoopy, myvideo and Twac. How are these sites going to differentiate themselves from the rest of the local herd, and how are they going to provide local users with an incentive to post videos on their sites instead of YouTube? Tyler Reed has written an detailed comparison of the three current local sites that is well worth reading. Twac has an interesting model - professionally made (and genuinely funny by the looks of things) content that you have to purchase or buy a subscription for, as well as free user submitted content. Myvideo is offering (somewhat controversially) to pay a R1000 bounty for newsworthy video content, while Zoopy, by far the most professionally designed of the three, is going for the social networking angle and letting users share video as well as photos.
The problem that all of these sites face is that the barrier to entry into the market is so low. Anyone with a credit card can go and buy a domain and a $99 Clip-Share php script (look familiar MyVideo.co.za?), and launch their own video sharing site. The key, as always, is content. I reckon the key to all three of these sites future success lies in figuring out how to gain traction with the schoolkids that make most of the user generated video content. Once you have a social group or school using a specific service then the growth will be exponential. The first one to figure out how to do this will be the winner here.