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Google Losing Up To $1.65M a Day On YouTube
An anonymous reader writes "The average visitor to YouTube is costing Google between one and two dollars, according to new research that shows Google losing up to $1.65 million per day on the video site. More than two years after Google acquired YouTube, income from premium offers and other revenue generators don't offset YouTube's expenses of content acquisition, bandwidth, and storage. YouTube is expected to serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009, costing Google up to $2,064,054 a day, or $753 million annualized. Revenue projections for YouTube fall between $90 million and $240 million."
Maybe this is in part because, as Al writes, "Researchers from HP Palo Alto studied videos uploaded to YouTube and found that popularity has little to do with quality or persistence."
"Researchers from HP Palo Alto studied videos uploaded to YouTube and found that popularity has little to do with quality or persistence." Let me be the first to say "I told you so."
Content Acquisition - $710,000
Revenue Sharing - $66,000
Administrative Costs - $252,000
I might be able to see the bandwidth costing a million dollars a day but could someone explain how Credit Suisse and comScore came up with these numbers?
My work here is dung.
Youtube needs a government bailout. They're more deserving of it than the others who have gotten one.
That's around $185 per second. That's quite a bit.
they're making it up in volume.
First against the wall when the revolution comes
While much has been made of Google's amazing ability to make money with online advertisements, the cracks in the dike are beginning to leak.
Youtube is only the first domino in Google's house of cards. As Google increases server-side requirements to support their growing portfolio of online products, they will reach a point where advertising simply won't be profitable anymore. Youtube with its heavy server-side requirements (even running on lighttpd!) just isn't cost effective considering the number of pages they need to serve and the direct links to media they provide.
As someone who likes services that are free, I will mourn the loss of advertiser-paid services, but in terms of the viability of the web this day was inevitable.
...by stopping visiting YouTube!
Oh wait, no. It doesn't. Because like Microsoft and HP and printers and every other company in the planet with a loss leader product, Google might very well be realizing additional profit from their unprofitable video experiment. For a company like this, nothing is as simple as simplistic per-visit loss analysis.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Content Acquisition - $710,000
Revenue Sharing - $66,000
Administrative Costs - $252,000
Being the number 1 video site on the internet.... Priceless
Tibbon
tibbon.com
YouTube positions Google to try and be the next iTunes, to turn Android into the next iPhone and be the place where video and audio providers need to be to sell their content. I'm sure Google knows this and considering the economic realities of the day are looking at ways to move in on Apple. I mean really, why else would they be burning that much money folks. There has to be more of a plan when it comes to Google and media than to spend 5 billion waiting for bandwidth to become cheaper.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
You can't count revenue you never had as lost money. Google is losing the potential income of $1.65 million a day. If they were actually losing that much a day, they'd be out of business soon.
And I think The Onion said it all.
I'm not sure exactly how. But, it is a completely different business model, and I'm not sure anyone has it figured out yet. I am grateful for the Googles of the world whoe enter these ventures without much thought to the compenssations, but I do wish them luck. I want youtube to stay around.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
are likely calculated as loss based on the potential for gains or sales...which is a calculation that is mostly speculation and
often used by businesses to inflate their urgency during an outage (ex: losing 1 billion dollars an hour.)
Good people go to bed earlier.
I bet at least $10,000 is spent hosting rickroll videos and the associated comments.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
It's just taking a while because we're emotionally attached to things like paper news.
But it's a process and the over-valuation of old media models are upheld by vested interests. Our current cable networks add nothing to the mix except for the occasional cornerscreen logo.
Ten years ago there would be no way to identify and fund popular content without cable companies. In ten years time there will be very few, if any, cable companies left - with virtually all production funded from web advertising revenue.
Getting from here to there is the tricky part, but it is inevitable.
Just do like a lot of other websites do. Insert a 30 second commercial that you can't skip through (like you use to be able to), before you allow the video to play.
Google has a fundamental problem: except for search ads, nothing they do makes money. Google has already dumped a few money-losing services, and they may well dump more of them. Even the few non-ad products that bring in revenue, like the Google Search Appliance and the corporate version of GMail, aren't very successful. Google stock is down 50% from the peak in 2007, and most of that decline came before the recession. Investors are getting annoyed at the money draining products.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google dumps YouTube and starts charging for GMail.
C'mon, are the quality and popularity statistics really that surprising when the average YouTube video is uploaded with a cheap webcam and recorded by someone who makes Paris Hilton look like Einstein?
I believe a famous dog once said "I leave more personality in tightly coiled piles on the lawn."
I see I'm not the only one who gets paid to do this.
popularity has little to do with quality or persistence
So what? How much does it cost to store a seldom-watched video?
If I upload a video of my kid falling off his bike, it costs essentially nothing for them to store it. And if my family members watch it five times, maybe it costs a little bit more.
But the brand loyalty YouTube creates by everybody knowing their video is still there? Priceless.
YouTube is like the web from 90ies... Everybody's dog was on there..
Try to find a music video? Well, you'll get 4000 videos dealing with viagra, terrorists, preteen girls, some dopey dudes and everything else EXCEPT for the video you were looking for.
I know that goog may not have the rights to the aforementioned music video, but it's fscking misleading and a waste of my time.
I know that there is some good stuff out there and there is a good idea behind it, but navigating through the crap, poorly edited, and inappropriate music on there takes too much time.
And why does every fscking teen think that blasting "Disturbed" is a valid soundtrack to every conceivable situation that can be recorded?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Er, no.
That's not research, its almost pure guesswork. The key part being the guesses as to revenue. The two different estimates (from Credit Suisse and Bear Stearns) come pretty close on total daily cost ($2,064,054 vs. $1,906,520), but they are differ by a huge amount in the estimates of daily revenues ($657,534 vs. $246,575) so there may be some reasonable basis for the cost numbers (or the same assumptions may be made by different analysts), but the revenue numbers (and consequently the profit/loss estimate) seem to be pulled out of the air.
How do you estimate strategic assets? How to estimate the value of "offering everything"? How much is it worth to put the thumb screws on every media company? Everybody goes to google video/youtube for seaching videos - if you are not mentioned, forget your business. I usually stay on youtube becaus i hate to add more and more noscript exceptions and because i know that it works. Would google introduce pay per view for movies, i would immediatly pay 20Euro/Month - if they keep it as trouble free as it is now. If one percent of the customers thinks like me, they cover their costs. Youtube may make money from hosting videos for companies. So what is it worth to have this position in the market? How strong do sony/ms try to push their media systems on theirs game consoles?
Honestly, looking at Google's repertoire of products, most of them don't make money. Only the advertising seems to.
Which is as long as Google can stay on top as search engine king, they can fund these unprofitable pieces of software, be it Chrome, or Gears, or Docs, or whatever... but if they slip in ad revenue, or they have a couple of shitty quarters, I can see some big trouble for Google.
Say what you will about MS, but they have profit centers throughout the company, and have a hoard of cash to boot. Not a bad idea for Google to follow suit in.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Sweet sweet irony.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm not sure what your comment has to do with the sentence you quoted. The part you quoted had to do with the fact that two bored people noticed that as person posted more and more videos that even though the quality of the videos would go up (as in production quality, etc) that the subsequent popularity of those later works wouldn't necessarily be higher than the previous works that were of a lesser quality.. It has nothing to do with the costs on Google of storing videos.
I would just need that amount for a few days. I'm sure I could turn it all around. Just deposit that amount in my offshore bank account as my salary. If it doesn't work... you won't be out any more than usual. Why not give me a try?
[signature]
Maybe that's a good queue to start cutting out those endless releases of the exact same videoclip that is polluting youtube and making it's search feature somewhat useless. Some searches end up presenting the user with 5 or 6 different versions of the exact same clip on the first page alone. What is that good for?
Once google starts a cull on youtube (i.e., a "flag this as a copy of X video" feature to delete it and redirect to the main video) I bet the company's storage costs will drop considerably.
If google did not have a rating 1 video site, some banker would say that google isnt well positioned in that market being there all mba geniuses and big is best.
The adverts on you tube (which i caught once and thought was rather basic) i also think made people think about posting stuff there.
I personally cannot play youtube videos on my recent latest and greatest debian install it crashes my ff3 browser - i might have the wrong flash - i now don't visit yt, So im not costing google $2 a day.
Also ever since viacomm sued youtube and started handing out our viewing profiles means i don't like to expose peoples privacy to youtube content to the riaa and associated evil empires.
So whatever google do its not going to make anybody happy, but then lawyers love suing google, bankers are well known for there crystal ball readings.
From TFA:
Bandwidth: If YouTube will get 375 million unique visitors in 2009 and each user downloads video at 400 kbit/s (based on figures from a range of sources), the cost to Google of YouTube bandwidth is a minimum of $1 million a day. This assumes YouTube is paying a minimum of 50 percent of the lowest market rate for megabit-per-second services.
wtf?
I do not think those numbers mean what you think they mean.
Visitors per year is irrelevant.
Simultaneous viewers is what matters.
$1M buys you 250 Gb/s at the 'best' market rate of $4/Mb/s.
(one might also presume that google is not f-ing insane and actually peers all over the place and does not pay transit for everything)
250Gb/s divided by 400Kb/s is 655K viewers.
I do not know how many simultaneous viewers youtube has but something called 'youtube live' may have had 700k simultaneous and that was billed as 'unusually high'.
a lot of people went to youtube to find eps of TV shows. Combine the takedowns with hulu, and that's got to be responsible for a lot of their lost revenue.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The average visitor to YouTube is costing Google between one and two dollars
No problem, they'll make it up in volume :-)
Your post is ironic for the ironic use of irony.
"Researchers from HP Palo Alto studied videos uploaded to YouTube and found that popularity has little to do with quality or persistence
No shit sherlock. What next? Water is wet? Come one, anyone who know even just a tiny of pop culture knows that is not about quality, it has never been. Come one, hasn't this people been to school? From childhood we are taught that "quality" and "knowledge" are to be shunned, and "cools", "looks" and dumb acts should be praised.
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
Let me relay a little dialog in which I learned the REAL revenue model of youtube. I got this mysterious call just a few days ago.
Me: Hello ... embarrassing video you posted to youtube a couple of years back? ... guess so?
Them: Mr or Ms Skull?
Me: Yes, may I help you?
Them: You remember that
Me: Um... yes?
Them: You know you gave us-- I mean, google ownership of it.
Me: I
Them: Yes. We have noticed that you have been searching for jobs lately.
Me: who is this?
Them: And we see from your email that you've been speaking with Innitech in particular.
Me: if you don't tell me-
Them: And we also see that you mapped out directions to their headquarters.
Me: I'm going to hang -
Them: If you don't want Innitech to find this video before hiring you, you will wire 1,000,000 USD to the following numbered account
90% of the videos on YouTube explain why YouTube sucks.
Blank until
I wonder if there is a connection to the massive job openings posted by Microsoft in China. The only requirement is as following: "Ability to hit refresh-button on an internet browser."
So stuff that a big huge corporation put together and protects with draconian copywrite a DMCA is only worth it? Individuals can't come up with good ideas and offer them for free?
Here are 2 examples that completely blow that out of the water:
http://www.youtube.com/user/davidspates
http://www.youtube.com/user/Peacer
And the second guy recently got a job with some major media group because of the talent he showed on youtube!
Here's another example, but it may not be to everyone's entertainment tastes but you can't dispute the quality of the actual animation is great:
http://www.youtube.com/user/MondoMedia
And here's some "big media" content actually provided without those draconian restrictions:
http://www.youtube.com/user/BritainsSoTalented
http://www.youtube.com/user/JanisDigitalMedia
The first one is the most subscribed channel on youtube. The second is content for a local radio station in philly. I find both of these sub par compared to the previous links, but hey people want to subscribe to them, and the owners must be leveraging some kind of success out of them.
So I directly challenge that the assertion that the only good stuff on youtube is the stuff taken down by DMCA. I think the only stuff you ever bothered to look for was stuff you already saw on TV.
Oh... and did you forget the Monty Python channel? If you don't think that's worth it, then I demand Taco ban your IP immediately for proclaiming such heresy!
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
HP Palo Alto researcher's reaction to 2girls1cup is top 1 video in youtube.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
There is no other organization in the world that cares more about Google's expenses than Google. If Google was in fact drowning itself in expenses that it couldn't possibly recoup then it would never implemented youtube's support for high definition clips. I mean, why would they implement a feature that in the end is nothing more than implementing the exact same service while spending about 4 times the bandwidth?
Moreover, it's somewhat amusing how someone can proudly claim that someone is spending millions while at the same time confessing that it is basing his calculations on absolutely zero hard facts or figures. They don't know how much google earns from youtube, they don't even know the order of magnitude Google's bandwidth expense is in. Yet, they try to calculate things.
It starts to get really silly when their calculations, based on nothing more than whims and assumptions taken out of thin air, are presented as $1,406,720 or $1,659,945. That means that they present a result which is the fruit of pure imagination in the form of a number with 7 significant digits. I can't measure anything with that kind of exactness even if I'm holding it in my very hands. Impressive.
To sum things up, nothing to see here.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
As companies get larger they tend to attract 'bad karma'. Companies offset this though good will, often donations to charities. Bill Gates is a lot less evil when you consider all the money he has donated. Google uses YouTube (and other services) as a source of good will. People are more willing to forgive Google's slip ups and places where there is no good choice to make (e.g. censorship in China) if they show they are out to make the world a better place.
Someday... I gave up speculating when... Internet 2 may revive the concept of the MBONE. YouTube is the end result of killing multicast. Yes, sometimes I want to see home made videos of cats flushing toilets. Yes, I know it has no social value.
A central hosting model will NOT work. Only a distributed one will. And it should support LIVE one-to-many scaling. The END USER should pay for this. If my garage band hits it big, I should be able to push a medium bit rate H.264 stream into the grid, and the grid should copy it to everyone who subscribes. Maybe it's PIM driven multicast, maybe it's something in Internet 2 I don't even know about yet.
If 120,000 people watch my feed, then so be it. I don't pay extra for feeding that content into the grid, it's absorbed into my fixed cost. Also, there should be no censorship. PIM doesn't support authenticated joins, but the future model must.
The "You" in You tube has to go back out to the people. Multicast or the network based model is the only way to do it.
'Sup dog, I heard you like irony so I put irony in your iron so you can have irony while you're ironing.
I got a comment p0wnd the other day for what I figured would get tagged as flaimbait since it goes against the grain of common concept here at slashdot lately, and got flagged "Redundant", though it wasn't redundant in the slightest, yet THIS P.O.S posts as "News" that is pretty much the same exact issue discussed in the previous thread
YOUR REDUNDANT!
(ahhhh Karma to burn...........sorry for the rant)
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
The end of the advertisement based internet, prediction #102212211. Allow me to file it with all the other IT predictions, I had a heavy lunch so need to go to the filing room anyway.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Google's strategy is not simply about creating or acquiring ubiquitous online services regardless of profitability. A lot of comments so far have missed the forest for the trees. You want to know why Google beats its competitors in advertising? It's not just brand presence or market domination. It's the way in which they cross-analyze data collected from ALL their services in order to increase the accuracy of their advertising.
I mean, hasn't anyone noticed this yet? Your GMail, Blogger, Calendar, Picasa, and YouTube accounts are all linked. Even the original search that Google started out with provides valuable analytics that are still trade secrets. Users of these services leave a data trail that provides Google with all kinds of information about the user's preferences. That information then gets analyzed and targeted ads are served that increase the likelihood that they'll be clicked. And that's how Google gets the business. Their biggest fear is not whether a product is losing money; it is that nobody is using it and therefore there is no data to mine. All these serivces are just carrots they dangle for the end-user. Their true customers are those who pay for the data they collect from us.
One service does not have to turn a direct profit in order to increase the value of the overall business model.
The plan is much bigger. Google is doing on internet what Microsoft did on desktop. YouTube is like IE. It won't make money. It's not supposed to. The aim is to control the content and lock it. Google is spawning rapidly in controlling the content over the web. Chrome was phase 2 and phase 3 will be the much-rumored routers. After that money will rain. As it did for Microsoft after Win95 and Office XP.
Eclipse PDE and Me
I'm not sure exactly how. But, it is a completely different set of ballistics, and I'm not sure anyone has it figured out yet. I am grateful for those of the world who are shot from a cannon without much thought to the results, but I do wish them luck. I hope they don't go splat like everyone else who's tried it.
(Also, isn't "web economics are different" a Web 1.0 statement?)
-Graham
when you have pornhub.com and youramateurporn.com ?
Google isn't losing money on YouTube. They're investing.
People forget that Google isn't about advertising, or search, or webmail. They're not about video content or data farms or VoIP.
Google is about one thing: data harvesting. Google is doing a fine job at that. We all know that cable, satellite and broadcast methods of transmitting video and audio are dying. There's no future in doing things through unidirectional multicast. Entering the cable business can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to start a channel and get it redistributed. Google is spending pennies compared to that losing game.
What YouTube offers Google is the ability to figure out how to send video and audio information to desiring users: who are they, what do they want, how long do they watch, how many people redistribute the video on their blogs or social networks, who leaves a comment, etc. This information is priceless, and paying $1 a person a day is NOTHING.
For my businesses, acquiring a client can cost me thousands of dollars of time, marketing, and brain energy. Google acquires new people and knows their statistics for $1 a person? That's throwaway money.
YouTube now does "HD", which is quite a step up from their "SD" resolution. The horizon shows Google doing more with what they have.
YouTube, in my opinion, is Google's best acquisition. Search terms are great to know, but when you can combine that information with what a person watches, and what they say in comments, you've got a future goldmine of opportunities to create a data store for billions of people now coming online.
These corporate media researchers are clueless. Their jobs are at stake by passing on false information rather than spending man-hours discovering WHY Google is making this and many other investments that the old school thinks are senseless.
It's getting annoying searching and finding anything.
Google needs to add it's search engine techniques to it.
. . . yeah, but they'll make up for it in volume! ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Time is on Google's side. Look ten years down the road. Hosting costs and bandwidth costs will be greatly reduced, as is the trend. (Think how far web technology has come since 1999.) Advertising models will have matured, and YouTube will have profitable deals with specific content providers.
The most important thing to have is users. People use Google for searches because it is familiar and it is a habit. The same is now true for videos and YouTube. Despite the fact that other video sites exist, most people think of YouTube by default. Google is willing to lose money now in order to encourage this habit, so that when it does become profitable they will be in prime position.
Maybe it is because of the huge global economic crisis and marketing is first to be slashed.
Hmm, turns out it's really hard to monetize funny cat videos and people falling off of stuff.
Who knew?
on computing. They work very hard to have the least cost per computing operation as well as bandwidth. They are also one huge mofo. So they also benefit from economics of scale.
Now if those calculations are based on SUN hardware purchases and usual/normal datacenter costs they might be off by a bit.
Thread needs more boxxy.
Why don't they just charge people. Even $1 would be enough considering nearly the whole internet world uses the site. I would play to use it. Considering a lot of sites/blogs use it as there personal server for video content.. Simple. Its been 5 years of free access. start charging people
The average visitor to YouTube is costing Google between one and two dollars [...]
Over what time? In total?
Because I'd have no problem, paying $2 a year for YouTube. Even more, if most of it goes straight to the creators of the videos I'm watching, and the videos are in the uploaded quality (up to full-HD). Kutiman alone would be worth that.
I'm all for micro-payment. Sounds fair to me. And they would make good money off of it, while supporting artist directly. (As long as they do not do it like the old media industry, and take 96.5% for themselves, and then still expect the artists to pay for the studio and everything... off of that money.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Google has basically been providing a public service to the internet-using world with YouTube. Like any other public service it has to be funded, at least in part, by taxes or donations. Maybe its time the government levied a YouTube tax. It would only be a couple dollars per person, and it's not like we don't already pay for public works that only some people use.
RTFA. The 1.65M$/day figure is $2M/day in operating costs minus $0.35M/day revenues from the site (third-party estimates, so yeah, YMMV). It's not "revenue they never had," it's operating costs that are not recovered from revenues.
Are you adequate?
As a writer/director/producer I find this most frustrating because they give no consideration to anyone willing to take the time to actually make something worthwhile, rather than just shoot themselves or their friends dicking around in front the webcam. Even worse, google/youtube refuses to even estimate what your potential earnings can be. How can anyone be willing to put a hell of a lot of time and effort into something, when they refuse to tell you what you can earn? Sure the exposure can be good, but it's no guarantee of financial sustainability for continued productions with any real effort behind it, if you can't even fund yourself. Ultimately, the only good thing youtube really caters to is goofy videos, cute chicks with blogs, whiny freaks, AMV's, or finding copyrighted material in a convenient spot. Don't get me wrong, it's cool that anyone can post virtually anything and if the service disappeared tomorrow I would be saddened, but if they're serious about profitability, they need to reach out and support real talent and create incentives for quality productions arise. Youtube has been around for 3+ years now, and they have yet to give rise to anything that could've survived outside of and beyond youtube. Quality content brings in real money, just ask TV networks/DVD sales.
Google didn't buy a money-making business and then have it fail; they bought a very popular service that had not yet deployed a profit-making business model, and they haven't yet gotten it to make a profit. It's a much different situation, and they knew it when they bought it, so it's not like they're surprised.
The real question is how and when they thought they'd be able to get it to profitability, and whether they're on track for that yet or not. If they expected it to be making a profit by now and it's not close, then FAIL, but if they didn't, it's in the same shape as any 1990s-boom internet startup, potentially realistic or potentially just another underpants-gnomes waiting for 5. PROFIT! to happen.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The article's assertion was that the frequent posters are usually not the most popular ones, because adding lots of material doesn't usually have enough novelty necessary to attract lots of viewers.
From a profitability standpoint, that's ok - some fraction of the cost of YouTube is uploading and storing new content, but a presumably-larger fraction is the cost of transmitting it to viewers, and the cost to YouTube for transmitting 3 minutes of video to a watcher is relatively independent of whether it was Video 12345678 or video 87654321. (It's a bit different - the most popular videos will get cached more, but that's still independent of whether they're from uploaders who post a little or a lot.)
The big question becomes whether they can make money on the average viewing of a video, whether that's from ads on the page or commercials at the beginning of the video or soundtrack song sales or whatever. Will that depend on how much the authors post, or only on how often individual videos get played? Will some _kinds_ of content be more profitable than others, and will they find a way to promote those or at least prioritize them?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Is when corporations post videos of their products and use YouTube as a marketing aid without any money going to Google. Google is paying for bandwidth and advertising distribution and companies don't pay a dime to Google for this.
I love Will It Blend but I am sure that the company does not pay Google a fee for hosting their product videos meanwhile it probably should.
Google Video had the right idea back in its hayday -- bring movies, documentaries online. I remember back a couple of years ago, a ton of Japanese movies made prior to 1953 that had become public domain were put into Google Video, and I watched a couple. Additionally, a good amount of documentaries were up.
Google needs to monetize off of movies and tv shows. They should keep their current ad format (the semi-transparent ads) for user videos, and then they should use interstitial ads based on the length of the video for commercial ads. Additionally, they could charge more for videos with higher amounts of daily viewings.
For instance, maybe put 1 commercial break for every 15 minutes of video. If you want to advertise during Days of Our Lives, maybe it won't cost so much. But if you want to place an advertisement during South Park, it's going to cost you a lot more, just like real TV advertisements.
Additionally, they should try very hard to get anime companies on board. There are many, many millions of people who would love to watch anime on YouTube, even in shit-quality, even with a few short interstitial ad breaks if they could. Anime companies are much more on top of changing technologies than the movie or TV industries, and I think it'd be beneficial for both of them to start offering their content online to users for free.
Which is quite clearly how long the 'friend' carries on filming, before turning off the camera to go and help.
Bonus points are awarded for zooming in on the injury and horrific camera shake due to uncontrolable giggling.
From the Researchers at HP Palo Alto article: 'Their rather depressing finding is that "the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold."' I would think the die-off in popularity is the same phenomenon as Hollywood making sequels that aren't as good as the original than due to the dilution of brand. For example: Rocky, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars. In all those cases, success = bigger budget for the sequels and slicker movie, but better movie? Rarely.
I remember stories of Google buying up lots of dark fiber during the dot com crash... but I've never read exactly what they're doing with it. It would seem reasonable to assume they're using it for something though, such as pumping craploads of date thru it.
I know if I was Google I'd not be paying an ISP to connect my youtube farm to the internet - I'd be colocating youtube servers with massive storage in major ISPs, feeding them with my own fiber, and paying for the colo costs with bandwidth.
TFA author pulled a random number out of his backside and for bandwidth costs which make up 50% of the total costs. If that bandwidth number is way off, as it easily could be, then the rest of the conclusions are off too. GIGO.
Come to think of it, I just bought a 1T Hitatchi hard drive for $89. That's $0.09 per gig with retailer and manufacturer's profits both built in. Google undoubtedly buys directly from manufacturers.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
There's at least one enjoyable professionally made video on youtube I could think of off the top of my head, and I don't even go there that often!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0
3 years ago Google snapped up youtube during part of the economic boom where companies threw around money like it was nothing.
At that point in time, youtube was filled with mostly 'video blogs' and inane rubbish, very few genuinely funny, original or interesting things were posted.
I said then that I could not possibly understand how youtube is worth 1.6billion dollars.
Don't get me wrong, it's blossomed and it's cool, it's funny, it's entertaining and it has potential - it's reliable and HD mode even looks half decent but as I said then, WHERE IS THE BUSINESS MODEL?
I mean we're talking some serious, serious gigabytes of data, in hard disk space and bandwidth (obviously, duh)
There's a tonne of content which is also very likely duplicated, an absoloute tonne! Do they even have an algorithm which checks if an uploaded video matches the same CRC as another to save space?
Honestly, youtube is fantastic but I don't see how they can make money.
I like the service but I'm a tightass, most of us geeks are, the difference between what I'll use for free and what I'll spend my money on are massive.
The second I'm paying a cent, I have expectations, I don't want to wait for some bullshit stream to come in, I don't want hickups, I don't want sound out of sync with video, I want service and I want it now.
So advertisements certainly make a bit of cash but they need something more and extracting money from people has always been difficult on the internet.
Good luck to them - I hope they keep youtube going but I can't imagine in this financial climate that google will start bleeding cash wildly.
Credit Suisse and Bear Sterns. I don't think they qualify for any type of calculating task.
Please folks! the cost is $1 per user per year - not day!
The maths is based on an estimate of 375M unique visitors in 2009,
and a whole bunch more wild guesses.
Does nobody RTFA? ... Really? They don't? Sorry.
While much has been made of Google's amazing ability to make money with online advertisements, the cracks in the dike are beginning to leak.
Youtube is only the first domino in Google's house of cards. As Google increases server-side requirements to support their growing portfolio of online products, they will reach a point where advertising simply won't be profitable anymore. Youtube with its heavy server-side requirements (even running on lighttpd!) just isn't cost effective considering the number of pages they need to serve and the direct links to media they provide.
As someone who likes services that are free, I will mourn the loss of advertiser-paid services, but in terms of the viability of the web this day was inevitable.
Dude, you forgot the most important part:
It is official. Netcraft now confirms: Google is dying.
I lost my sig.
A play on words. The statement Google losing up to $1.65M a day on YouTube can be understood in a different way. Show a video of Google losing this money every day. That is, let's see a Google accountant adding up the books, pointing out the revenues and expenses, and obtaining a total on daily basis for, say, a week or a month.
I never paid Google anything for its services. Can Wikipedia store video (not the gifs)?
Is Google really about profits? Google is a phenomenon. Google is about capturing organized information. It's about evading entropy. There should be a long-term benefit from this.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
On my secondary computer, which lacks a sleep/suspend-mode, I just keep all my web browser tabs open to whatever I was last viewing*, including YouTube videos. So, every time I restart the browser/computer, the videos reload. Whoops!
*In Firefox, I deliberately crash the web browser in order to restore my tabs. I should really just bookmark all of them, but it's just easier this way.