So you think we’re in the middle of an “explosion” of online video clips, in particular consumer-created video clips? Think again. How many videos have you published online so far? Compare that to the number of web pages you have written or contributed to.

It’s still only very few people who upload clips. The “masses” haven’t even decided to start yet.

The “mass” consists of all the people who see something useful in uploading, making accessible, and finding video clips (and no, that’s not just pr0n). It took the Web a few years before companies started having a Web presence and to use the Web as a marketing instrument. It took private people even longer before they started having blogs and publish their cv and photo collections.

Videos can be used as much as a marketing instrument as a Web page. In a convergent world, videos will even be more important than text because it reaches the couch potato. People will start making videos about their success story in gardening, about their home-grown cooking receipe, about the way to repair a special valve on their car, about how to train pets – or children (“be your own super-nanny”). Small companies will make videos about their products, the corner-shop will advertise its services to the neighbourhood, the medical centre will present its doctors and procedures through online videos, the computer shop its software, the travel agency its best locations etc. The video explosion on the Web hasn’t even started yet.