Think you’re addicted to YouTube now?  Your fifteen minutes a day – maybe five or six videos of two or three minutes each – are a fraction of the five hours you spend daily watching television. Google, YouTube’s owner, is not happy about that and has plans to raise your dose substantially.

Dude, when YouTube is through with you you’re gonna be freebasing videos.

You probably haven’t been aware of it, but right now you have too much choice.  When you go on the YouTube website you make choices about what you want to watch.  When you finish watching a video you have the choice to select another or to exit the website.  YouTube doesn’t care for choice one little bit. “Every decision point is an opportunity to leave,” says a company executive, and opportunities to leave are not good for business. Not good at all.

Randall Stross, writing in the “Digital Domain” feature of the Sunday New York Times, says that YouTube has devised a strategy to capture your attention to keep your eye on the screen and your hand off the exit key. “This fall,” writes Stross, “YouTube says it will introduce a radically different, uncluttered look, with YouTube Leanback. It will have a separate Web address and will start playing a video the moment a user clicks on the site. When one video ends, another will start automatically, eliminating those dreaded ‘decision points’ that invite abandonment.”

But there’s more – hours and hours more.  Stross reports that the chief of YouTube’s user experience team – yes that’s actually a title -  says the site is stepping up its long-form content – “television shows, professionally produced Webisodes and movies, as well as live sporting and music events.”

Prepare to trade in your couch for…another couch, compliments of YouTube.

Read details in YouTube Wants You to Sit and Stay Awhile.

Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.