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uTube.com Business Stalled by YouTube Purchase Hype
prostoalex writes "Google's acquisition of online video sharing site YouTube.com resulted in massive traffic headed to uTube.com, "the number one supplier of used Tube & Pipe equipment in the world!", according to the site. CNN Money reports: "The company, which sells used machinery for making tubes to clients worldwide, has seen its site utube.com knocked off line by millions of online searchers looking for video site. "It's killing us," said Ralph Girkins, president and owner of the 22-year-old business. "All my worldwide reps use our Web site. Customers all over the world use it to bring up photos of the machinery, descriptions and specifications there."""
On top of that, now Slashdot links to it...
Good job y'all. They're already complaining about traffic and you link to their site?!
they're now at /.
Poor guys.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
Well luckily he has enough tubes for all those internets!
Take the link out of the story, seriously.
It seems they added more tubes to their internets...
Obviously, utube.com will be Google's next aquisition - just look at how much traffic they get!
just goes to show big corporations weather they are microsoft or google always end up doing evil deeds..
serenity now!
... and someone was kind enough to help them out a bit more with their traffic.
It's been said by the majority of the posts already, but seriously, take that link out. That's just poor judgement.
While you can. Might as well score some cash from the traffic.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
The site seems to be performing fine. Maybe someone's just taking the opportunity to get their company in the news. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
If they can't figure out a way to profit from this, too freakin bad for them.
Let Jon Stewart Explain
It's the year of the tube
Task Mangler
And how kind of the slashdot editors to link to utube directly, just to rub the slashdot salt into the wounds.
(I can hear their servers weeping in the corner right now).
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Yep. or do what these guys did. http://www.oogle.com/index.php
You know, MLB.com had this problem a few years ago when it was owned by some law firm. Their solution is simple, have a really simple front page saying "If you are looking for the video site YOUtube, click on the link,
if you are looking for used hardware, click on Utube
It will save them some trouble in the short run, but my question is shouldn't this be happening all along since youtube is popular BEFORE google decided to buy it out?
Their site is fine now. Their equipment, though...
They're a surplus machinery dealer, and much of their equipment has seen hard use followed by neglect. The neglect is worse than the hard use. This lathe is a good example. That's a good Monarch precision lathe, but the picture, taken in 2000, shows considerable rust. Most of their gear is like that; it looks like it came out of an abandoned factory. It's repairable; you can send the lathe back to Monarch for an overhaul. But it's not good for much in its current condition. If there's any rust in the bearings, the precision is lost.
For comparison, see this Monarch Lathe on eBay. Made in 1950, and still in good shape. Those things will last a century if cared for.
If you have machinery like that around that's not in use, you have to oil it, then wrap it in plastic with some dessicant inside.
Now, whatever you do, don't click this link Resist the temptation. It isn't worth it. Really, it's not all that interesting.
do they not know how to use a plunger?
With vigorous plunging action any blockage should be able to be resolved.
The most frightening aspect of this is that there are tens of millions of people out there that are having a difficult time spelling out YouTube. If it were a case of mistyping, would that particular iteration really show up that much? Perhaps we have millions of kids out there who genuinely believe that you is spelled u.
Wherever possible, pick a name that is easily read in an email or understood when read out over radio, on the phone, or in conversation. Also, easy to remember and spell.
But almost $2b later, I can't imagine that the founders care all that much!
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
I'm sure that they'll be thrilled to have been slashdotted in addition to being deluded by deficient spellers.
-- Nothing unusual happened today
EweTube, the world's premier manufacturer of sheep storage devices,
EwwTube, suppliers of air freshener to travellers on the London Underground and
YuTube, a site dedicated exclusively to promoting the restaurant of David Yu, chinese cook.
Well, actually several, but mostly it boils down to the utter lack of editorial standards. Bad grammar, bad spelling, slashvertisements, links to semi-literate amateur blogs for stories carried by decent, high-quality sites, and ... sheer idiocy like this. I enjoy slashdot. It's an interesting diversion. And I've been around for a long time, and I still haven't given up on it. But the complete and utter lack of editorial common sense or professionalism is simpy infuriating at times! I would miss slashdot if it disappeared, but there's no way I'm willing to pay for something this poorly produced. And that's the bottom line.
:)
However, at least this time I can be proud to announce that I did not RTFA!
Get rid of their bloated table-based HTML and put in something semantic and modern; should cut page load by 50%; just enough to keep them afloat during this slashdotting.
How could all those internet users knock the main company offline who was responsible for construction of the Internet?
I'm gonna need a spec.
Perhaps Google can buy Utube.com for a tidy sum!
and put some google ads on your site and get some of that mullah....
Talk about common sense.
Pope: "We have decided to ban certain type of statues inside Vatican City depicting erotic postures. Come here Father Bryan and Sister Camilla, and take of your clothes please. Ok this is pose 1..Bryan put your hand there.. this is pose 2... oh and..(takes off his clothes).. eh..yeah that seems right.. this is pose 3.
A million slashdot editors gasp in shock and then erect similar statues all over the city to inform everyone what kind of statues are not allowed.
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
That video is hilarious! I had to bite my finger to stop myself from shocking everyone in the office by a roaring laughter.
Damn I should really get back to work.
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
If anyone, HE should have enough tubes for the internet!
Ok, I'm quite sure someone beat me to that lame joke. But can someone come up with any reason why anyone on this planet would go to utube.com instead of youtube.com? I mean, who doesn't go to youtube.com by link but actually by typing in the URL? Usually I go there 'cause someone posted a "must check this out" on some bboard.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They should have thrown a few google ads on the home page. Easy to do. If they can specify youtube ads, they'll get click thru too.
What? Me? Sig?
"All my worldwide reps use our Web site. Customers all over the world use it to bring up photos of the machinery, descriptions and specifications there."
I guess they found out the hard way that making normal business operation dependent on the availability of the website, without taking great pains to assure that availability, is asking for trouble.
This time, they got slashdotted by mistake. Next time, it could be a targeted DDoS attack.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Utube marketing guy: WTF? Our server is down!
Utube hosting provider: (putting down fire extinguisher) We want more money, you're burning bandwidth like the U.S. burns fossil fuels!
Utube marketing guy: Wait - I've just hear that Google bought YouTube and people are interested. Hey! This is an amazing marketing opportunity, I wonder how we can make use of it? (Pays hosting provider big wodge of cash)
(...ten minutes of googling later)
Utube marketing guy: My highly expensive and accurate research shows that tubes are incredibly important to our new potential customer base at slashdot.org, they talk about them a lot.
Utube CEO: OK, so how do we get their attention?
Utube marketing guy: Simple, we whine to CNN about how our business is going down the toilet thanks to google, then submit a story to slashdot - they love that stuff!
(...)
Slashdot editor: Hmm, I've been rejecting a lot of stories like this recently, and this one appears to be suitably poorly put together - perfect!
Slashdot editor: (skipping "Dupe Check"/"Spel Check"/"Grahma Check" buttons) *PUBLISH*
Slashdot readers: Oooh, how cruel to link to that site! (Follows link to see if servers really are down or not).
Server room: (indifferent rattle of hard disks)
Utube hosting provider: (puffing on expensive cigar) Suckers! Time to order my new Humvee.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
think about it- "E"bay "E"trade they hear about utube on the radio business news or finance programs, (npr for example) and type that name in, best guess
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Maybe Google should buy some of those tubes and pipes to stop the internets clogging up.
Well luckily he has enough tubes for all those internets!
/dev/drain.
He must be planning to pipe the unwanted traffic down the
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Now i know why they named their site YouTube instead of uTube. The second would be more appropriate given the audience, but was already taken.
If their website host gives them overage charges they might be able to get google to pay. Then again they might get some extra business out of it by change. Either way I would like to see their website stats
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Sell utube.com to Google/YouTube and then buy universal-tube.us, universaltube.us, or any of the .biz extensions.
Its not really that much of a problem for them, and a more practical naming opportunity.
Google puts adds up based on the content of the website, so you would want google to put video related adds up, but they're going to put adds up relating to piping and stuff like that. I guess adsense would still be nice, but it's probably not going to get you as much as you perhaps should for as much traffic as those guys are probably getting
And now its going to get slashdotted! Like it was'nt getting enough hits already. :-)
Lord of the Binges.
URI '/' only
I don't get it.
Where are my mod point when i need them!
Sue slashdot for linking them! If this is not a deliberated Denial Of Service I cannot tell what is! It is totally irresponbible to link to utube.com if you meant yourtube.com!.
-- ac.
How long until fox buys the domain (or just ad space) and sticks a big myspace video there to confuse the already confused?
Is it possible for the Slashdot effect to be topped?!?!?!
V for Vendetta: People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.
Well shit, this seems like pretty good free advetising for these guys. I'd stop complaining if I were them...
Paid Q&A/Research
NotATruck.com has also experienced a major spike in traffic, due to confused congressmen.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It's a site for oddly shaped female sheep. They're getting hammered baaaaadly.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
youtube
utube
jutoobe
ju2b
Of course this isn't ideal, but it can allow their reps to get in while they work on a permanent solution. Isn't that what is important from a business perspective? I doubt this one extra click they have to go through would significantly impact sales (or at least much less than people not being able to get in at all). Sure, it's a problem and should be worked on and resolved, but there's no reason business has to come to a standstill. Sometimes people don't seem to have common sense, or perhaps they just like to complain to the media.
This reminds me of the copyright whiners who complain and threaten lawsuits about search engine caching, instead of just editing their robots.txt.
2 companies, same pronounsiation.
sysco - provider of food stuff to eateries
http://www.sysco.com/
cisco - provider of network equipment.
Consumers confusing uTube for YouTube and getting a broken/down site (uTube) instead of the gleaming new $BILLION "Internet TV" site is bad for YouTube. It makes those confused people think that YouTube is crap. So it's in YouTube's interest to subsidize uTube's site capacity for a while to handle the extra YouTube traffic. YouTube can get an idea which sites are getting that "brand leakage" by looking at their incoming logs, for referrer sites, if the referring site survived long enough to put a link back to YouTube. Of course broken sites can try to figure out which site the incoming stampede was looking for, and notify the actual site (from another working computer). And the same people who research trademarks to ensure they don't infringe inside industry sectors can also find likely casualties even outside the sector. Google seems like an excellent resource, and could offer a "close domain" tool that would also help regular googlers.
There is probably some residual promotional value to the other sites, like uTube, even if few YouTube customers will ever do business with uTube.
So a little proactive capacity planning by YouTube for its "typo neighbors" would help both of them, without the nasty (and somewhat silly) lawsuits. Should be a lesson to others scaling their brands on the Internet.
--
make install -not war
Yeah, let's submit a story with a link to Slashdot! That oughta bring their servers down in flames!
Oh wait...
If most of that is coming from youtube, there has to be a way to filter out that traffic and make some serious cash from it. I'm sure one of you enterprising programmers can work out something with the owner of the company.
Maybe this will teach some people how to spell "you". That is an art form that seems to be lacking among the under-25 crowd these days ...
Their home page loads 100 images and has HTTP headers that forbid caching. I realize that not everyone can hire good web developers that take scalability issues like this into account, but surely this is an example of when you need to bite the bullet and do so.
"Utube's tubes are being clogged by YouTube boobs"
(Shamlessly stolen to share to the word)
Back in the day, that would have benefitted mostly copper and fiber-optics manufacturers, but that was before the technology to move data through a series of tubes came into widespread acceptance. uTube stands to sell BILLIONS of tubes because of this deal.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
do these guys make the internet tubes?
Oh, yeah, post a link on SlashDot. That will ease our traffic woes. Yep.
the cnn article doesn't link to any of the websites in the article. (they are only linking to cnn stock quotes for the respective companies.) For some reason, traditional news websites such as cnn.com and nytimes.com never link to the sites their articles refer to.
An excellent solution. Too bad that (in my experience) most companies don't have someone that thinks very fast in charge of overseeing the website -- and the outside designer (and certainly not the bandwidth provider, as has been pointed out) don't care.
And, of course, as has also been suggested, adding a little advertising banner to said page would help pay for bandwidth...
I suspect this will not entirely peter off once the news of the acquisition fades into memory, because YouTube.com will be a popular site for a very long time to come. "uTube.com" is a fine alternate domain name for the video site.
Google should offer them a bunch of money for "uTube.com", because it has value to Google, but it is a pure liability for the pipe sellers.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Ipowerweb* ended up buying iPower.com from an engineering company because they were sick of getting calls from iPowerweb's clients.
cLive ;-)
*my employer
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
http://www.google.com/trends?q=utube
troll.
I think this is a newsworthy story. It points out a trend towards the creation of innocent victims on the internet stemming from simple confusion - a great weakness of the internet as I see it. This is supported by numerous lawsuits about trademark infringments and the domain "squatting" problem found on domain names very close to popular sites - all important stuff. The posts are often, nearly always, written up by slashdot readers and no one claimed they were professionally done, thats why they all start with ( writes, "). The links, again, are often user-submitted and blogs often have an opinion attached to the story which adds some commentary - a news article is supposed to be based largely, if not completely, on facts and perhaps the submitter thought it was important. It seems like you're misinterpreting what slashdot is in a major way. Also, your response to the articles grammer had fairly terrible sentence structure itself - hardly a suitable postion from which to throw stones at someone elses grammer. You could have saved us all alot of time and just wrote, "I don't like this article". That being said, *OffTopic* and *Overrated*.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
since when does putting a link in an article make anybody click it, i'm as mmb happy as the next guy, but i get the jist of the site from the article, surely just mentioning the name of it is enough to make anybody who would click it to just type it in. i bet half you guys who mentioned the link being in the article didn't even click it.
As we all know, "Internet is just serious of tubes"... So you can definitely get yourself more internet...
It'd be like a 5000 people going into a Taco Bell at lunch time to get a hamburger. Taco Bell wouldn't exactly profit off that, and the people they would profit off of, the people who wanted a "taco" (made from used machinery) would not be buying "tacos" at their normal rate.
You completely missed the point. I don't object to the slashdot article (in fact, I think it's fairly interesting, for much the same reasons that you do). What I object to is the sheer idiocy of providing links to a site that's complaining about too much misdirected traffic! As for my grammar or sentence structure--I'm not claiming to be a professional writer, nor asking for payment for my writing, so your arguments there are moot. But at least I can spell "grammar". Ask me if I'm concerned about criticism of my sentence structure from someone who can't! :p ;)
and here I am, without any mod points to give you a well-earned "insigtful". . .
"He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. [...] It's what drives men mad, being methodical." G.K.Chesterton
Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)
It can be a publicity stunt by Utube to get more traffic on the site.
Complete Web Hosting Solutions at eUKhost.com
I guess the post author could say the same since you started 70% of your sentences with a conjunction; might want to check the word conjunction out in the dictionary. Otherwise I can agree with your frustration with links to sites that simply won't ever be able to handle the load but I'd hate the think of or participate in any system that could fix this problem - which would amount to a narrow big-business ruled view of the topics at hand. Maybe they should think about mirroring linked pages locally. I did misspell grammar, but if thats all i misspelled then I consider that a successful post.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)