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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."
Is this phenomenal growth only rapidly killing our favorite video warehouse?"
Which one would that be? I don't rent videos. More likely it's a sign that people are more interested in content than quality. Many of the videos I've seen are very poor grade, while the few who really care about HD-DVD and Blu Ray squabble off in the corner.
YouTube could easily alienate its users by overwhelming them with ads.
This has in my experience been proven unfounded with Yahoo, Google, eBay and slashdot as examples. Bring on the ads.
[legal threat] hanging over their head
I expect this is due to the fact many videos are edits from television, easily spotted by the Sky or whatever logo in the corner.
pay to place a video on YouTube's popular front page."
Oh the vanity! People really do that??? If I want you to see my video I'll put it on my own site and mention it somewhere, maybe even slashdot and it it's interesting word will get around, if it's not, my ego won't be crushed. I will be pissed if those weasels at thinkgeek steal it for another merchandising product.
It is rather amusing to look back several years, if you remember a particular broadcast of some dot-commer telling someone at CBS(?) they would be burying the network, with whatever the heck it was this particular dot-commer had to offer over the budding internet. His company, IIRC went bust with a lot of others. Now look at the rabble scrabbling on YouTube, Google Video, their predecessors and whatever else will come along.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"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."
YouTube could easily alienate its users who are mostly there to see the copyrighted and offensive videos to start with. Cleaning up YouTube might attract new marketers at the start but when the numbers decline what will YouTube have left? Sadly funny home video sites are a dime a dozen, YouTube has survived off its own lawlessness...kind of a catch 22 for them. I know I wouldnt want to own stock in them.
All the social networking and video clips companies are just leading the charge to the next bust. The business model seems to be:
1) start "social" website
2) grow user base
3) ??
4) get bought out by Big Company X
5) profit!
6) site dies because it was lame to begin with
7) SUCKERS!!! - Precious Roy
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).
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I'm not sure if such a legal argument is tenable and as I'm not a lawyer I'm not going to attempt one. But the overall scheme is that sharing clips of copyrighted work without profiting from its sale should be considered fair use. The majority of television networks understand that the sharing of clips amongst Internet sites in the long run benefits them. It promotes their show and their network. That is why there isn't much of an uproar about copyrighted content on youtube. Of course entire works should be barred.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
I made some lovely graphs to illustrate this growth. These graphs use actual thumbnails from youtube as data points.
That's right - the medium is the message!
Charge a membership fee.
Now, before everyone goes bonkers, lets think about this critically. Servers, the power to run them, the buildings to house them, the people to keep them running, the people to write the code that makes the site run -- these are not free. If you don't have a huge wad of cash burning a hole in your bank, then you've got to find a source of funding, one which won't suddenly dry up and leave you with no way to run the show.
So charge for the service. Plumbers do it, lawyers do it (excessively it seems), hospitals do it... why not an Internet service? You pay your $20 a year and get free unlimited uploads. For those who don't like the model, you can have a free account, but we charge you a nickel for every upload. It might cut down on the megatons of crap that get uploaded, which would ease the strain on infrastructure and storage, generate constant revenue, which would ease money headaches, and generally improve things. And then, when YouTube gets so successful that it's ubiquitous, its CEO can embezzle huge amounts of money and leave the company broken while he sails away on his yacht.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Let's see, go bankrupt or alienate some visitors.
Unless it's worth going bankrupt over and having a heck of a time getting financed for the next project, I'd say it's not a hard decision to risk losing some visitors in order to not go bankrupt. It's pretty pathetic when owners of a large site believe in the bandwidth fairy and fail to recognize they're the fairy. They're the ones paying for it.
It's time to either start putting some limits in place to get costs below revenue or to raise revenue. And if some visitors can't deal with it, then good riddence to them. You don't need a bunch of leechers driving you into bankruptsy. They obviously don't care about you so why worry about them?
Work Safe Porn
In the pilot for the old Max Headroom series, Network 23 pioneered a new type of advertising called "blipverts", fast, tightly-compressed burst of audio-visual information designed to prevent viewers from switching channels. Unfortunately, they had the side effect of making their "perpetual, more slothful viewers literally explode" but a similar idea could work here. YouTube doesn't have the advantage of conventional television, where people are watching a minimum 30 minute show, and will sit through a 30 second commercial spot in order to get back to what they really want. YouTube is offering what are essentially extremely short TV shows as their primary product with no real possibility of a commercial interlude. On the other hand, a two second advertisement presented at the beginning, if entertaining (or startling) enough, might be very effective yet not turn viewers off to the service itself.
Heck, if they want this to really work they should offer a plan that would reward submitters for presenting typical YouTube videos formatted as advertising for specific products. Those videos could then be shown to advertisers, who could pay to have the ones they like presented to regular YouTube viewers as advertising.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Honestly, I don't get this web 2.0 "problem" of more adds = angry community.
Well, let me put it in very simple terms - We found ways to gather and chat, for free, LONG before "Buzzword 2.0" ever appeared on the scene. Why should we have to start paying (with our time) for what we've had all along for free, just because some Johhny-come-lately media megacorp gave the same-ol a spitshine?
WAKE up... money makes the internet tick.
Wrong.
Those who have money want you to think they run the internet. The internet, however, exists without CBS and MSNBC (you could argue it wouldn't have existed without Ma Bell, but she only owns one of many possible physical layers that it can use).
YouTube, while not necessarily a viable business model, serves to prove this point - Copyright violations aside (though I don't mean to minimize how much they help), people flock to seeing all the low-quality home-made content - All the stupid pet tricks, stupid accidents leading to minor injury, camwhores, accidental news coverage, and even some of the less pathetic video blogs. NONE of that depends on having oodles of money. It all comes from the users, not the distribution method.
Yes, someone has to serve all that content, but without YouTube, we'd just find it scattered around the 'net, hosted at a million tiny personal sites rather than one large aggregation of such content.
But please, don't ever make he mistake of considering the internet anything like traditional broadcast media, where only the Big Boys with Big Bucks can ever even hope to have any control over it. WE currently control the net, and will continue to do so unless we throw that away for glass beads and whiskey.
They are not the only way to garner revenue from a site. Look at eBay. It costs me nothing to browse the marketplace there and if I want to bid, my account is free. If I want to sell my wares there, it'll cost me. However, because of those fees, eBay's ads are not intrusive and barely noticable.
The whole allure to YouTube is the fact that it's free to watch. I REALLY can't stand going to a site to watch some linked video only to have to sit and wait for the ad to load first and then I have to wait for the ad to finish playing and then I still have to wait for the video I went there to see to finish loading. I'll click out of that browser window before the ad even finishes playing. It's a waste of time. What is even more infuriating is depending on server load, it can take forever to load that ad because that same ad is being loaded by millions of computers all trying to view different videos.
That is what kills these sites, these excessive ads and membership fees. I think eBay has one of the best revenue generating models out there. Whether they are profitable or not is in the hands of thier management. I think that if YouTube wants to stay on top of the game yet be attractive enough to get investors to infuse capital then they need to start looking at a fee based system subsidized by ads and maybe a premium, fee based viewer service.
Charging the average viewer to see an amateur video that quite possibly will suck more wind than a Hoover is a sure fire way to piss off your viewers. Bombarding them with ads just to make them wait and surf through the crap only to view that same amateur crap mentioned above will also alienate them. After all, most of us could live a full and healthy life without ever viewing little Jimmy's guitar rif video on YouTube. However, little Jimmy might just be dashed in his dreams of being a guitar hero if he can't get his video out on the internet. So charging the viewers who don't have the necessity to see the video will not work. They won't be as willing to pay for something they don't need. For that kind of pricing to work, you actually need a commodity that people want. I'm not going to pay to watch someone else's crap. If it's free for me to watch, I will gladly go for the lark. However, if I have a video that I just gotta have out there and YouTube is my place of choice to host it then charge me out the wazoo to get it up there. After all, that perceived need to gain acceptance of my internet based peers who will view my video comes pretty damn close to making hosting services for my video a commodity. Therefore flat fee pricing would work there.
Now if YouTube has issues with excessive bandwidth and offensive things being posted then, charging a nominal fee to post the videos will help squash those problems. It will help because people will be less likely to waste thier money posting crap and then linking to it from many other sites. The viewership will not likely drop off in that respect but might actually pick up because like what was said above about quality vs. massive content, you will gain viewers looking for quality viewing and not just massive amounts of content.
With the number of page views they get, adsense is already paying them close to 2 mill a month.
u be-is-already-wildly-profitable/
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/08/24/yout