Last night I got an invitation to put all of our church videos on a new Christian-only version of YouTube. First there was GodTube and now this.
I laughed at GodTube’s claims that they were the fastest growing site on the internet… totally a joke of a statistic if you ask me… not like GodTube got bigger than Facebook did in 2007.
As far as interface and design go… could this new site be any more cheesy? Technically speaking… a lot of the videos don’t even work!
Let me share my opinion about “Christian only” content sites. I don’t mind sites that are geared towards Christians networking… heck, I own one. But I am against the idea that there should be a differentiation between the “Christian internet” and “secular internet.” Both GodTube and this new video site claim to be “family safe.” While that isn’t a bad thing in and of itself I always wonder why people like this don’t just create channels of “family safe” stuff within the existing structure of MySpace, Facebook, or YouTube. Christians were never commanded to separate from the world or form our own sub-culture… we were commanded to penetrate the culture for God. Ephesians 5 teaches us to bring “light” to “dark” places. These sites are trying to do the opposite.
I don’t plan on moving content to these new sites. If they offered services that were better than YouTube’s than I might consider it. But I’m not going to pull content off of a great delivery channel only to put it on a weaker and sorry to say cheesier delivery channel. That completely misses the point of using the internet for ministry.
Plus, I don’t know how YouTube doesn’t sue these companies for trademark violations. That’s for another day.
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