It appears that this is the recipe for success in online video blogs: hot looking girl + technology + video = traffic. Never a company to fall behind on the newest trends, Yahoo has released their video blog The 9. They scour the web daily for the most humorous, interesting, and outrageous videos and photos, and then deliver it in a monologue format (ie. hot girl talking). Is this something that Rocketboom needs to worry about?

Not hardly. The 9 sticks to relatively safe and popular media, with a monologue format that isn’t too far from what you would see on a topical news TV show. The subjects explored range from technology news, strange videos, and celebrity news. Due to the kind of mainstream traffic Yahoo gets, I’m sure throwing in celebrity news was an easy decision to easily win some loyal viewers.

The central idea is that their team of “monkeys” scours the net and the host, Maria Sansone, delivers the package. Users are also able to vote and rank the stories. The relevant links to the 9 videos are presented in a column to the right of the video. During the actual monologue, only segments of each video (or media) is shown, thus, urging the viewer to follow the links. Since Yahoo has a lot of bandwidth to spare (and, not to mention the heavy involvement of Pepsi as their sponsor), the monologue is delivered with pretty good video quality via a Flash interface, and is larger than other video blogs out there.

In the end, The 9 is more like a TV show than a video blog, which may be what Yahoo is going for anyway. It is, however, exposing the mainstream to watching a regularly updated online video segment everyday, which is a good thing for new media. But when it comes to niche, Rocketboom still has it. We’ll just have to see how the audience likes Joanne Colan, the new host.