Let’s start with a confession; I like to watch video games. Even when I was a kid, I preferred watching my friends to playing myself. In a fighter plane I’d be the the navigator.
It is rare for me to be on the front edge of a consumer trend since my hobbies tend to be pretty geeky. But when Twitch TV came along, I was an early adopter; I had already watched hours of gameplay videos on YouTube.
A while back someone wrote a piece about unbundling YouTube in which they stated that Twitch.tv was the first step. (Sadly, I can’t remember who wrote it, and my Google Fu was not up to the challenge of finding it.) My thought is that an obvious next step is “haul videos”.
Haul videos are when people unpack their shopping and show their followers what they purchased. A subset of the haul video is unboxing, where the host unboxes anything from high-end tech gadgets to cheap toys. The New York Times Magazine has an article about a woman who is making millions unboxing Disney toys.
Clearly people love this content, and YouTube isn’t designed with this in mind. There are such obvious ways to monetize and brands should be all over this. I’d love to see someone create a site for this niche since I think it will be huge once it goes mainstream
