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YouTube Growing ... Like Cancer?
PreacherTom writes "The success of YouTube has been staggering: they currently field 100 million videos per day and have attracted the attention of influential people like Bill Gates, who may be planning his own video hosting service. However, growth does not always equal profitability. Incorporation of ads risks their very base. If that were not enough, like Kazaa, they struggle with the Damocles' Sword of Litigation hanging over their head each day while bandwidth and server costs continue to rise. Is this phenomenal growth only rapidly killing our favorite video warehouse?" From the BusinessWeek article: "YouTube could easily alienate its users by overwhelming them with ads. And the startup has to figure out how to attract a broader group of marketers by filtering more for copyrighted or offensive videos and by creating more channels of similar content. Aware of the risks, YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are moving slowly to ramp up advertising. They have been wary of asking viewers to sit through a 30-second ad before a two- to three-minute clip. Instead, YouTube is developing new formats, like ones rolled out in August that let marketers build their own video channels or pay to place a video on YouTube's popular front page."
Speak for yourself. Google Video is my favorite. It has a picture that scales to fill up unused space in my browser window. Plus, as a content creator, I can upload videos larger than 100MB which you can't do on YouTube. YouTube's limitation can make the quality of your video suffer if it is too long (20 minutes or more).
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There have already been many examples of videos that would have never seen the light of day. Videos that would never be seen on TV, but can reach the same amount of viewers or more via the internet. Like videos of guys teaching you how to shave. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjhIy9rgWQU
People often assume that something like YouTube, Palm, Tivo or whatever becomes big because someone had a unique insight. But, more commonly, it's simple cost and demand. Palm succeeded because chips and displays had gotten cheap enough to build a usable handheld. Tivo succeeded because harddisks and compression hardware had become cheap enough. For YouTube, bandwidth had become cheap enough to allow putting lots of video on-line and distributing it toe end users.
However, even if things have become cheap enough to start a business, they may still not be quite cheap enough to sustain it; if YouTube needs to make more in revenue than delivering video content costs them, and it's not clear that they can. And whether they can depends less on any brilliant insights they may have, and more on consumer behavior, ad revenues, broadband availability, and bandwidth costs.
There are tons of smaller sites that are a hellofa lot more firendly. My favorite so far is Go Fish.