Youtube remains unprofitable 3 years after Google acquisition(dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com) |
Youtube remains unprofitable 3 years after Google acquisition(dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com) |
Seriously? People are still citing that hack-job of an analysis? It didn't even take peering into account - it was ridiculous.
Some common examples include Windows having a lower TCO than Linux, Theora being better than H.264, and of course practically anything in the realm of politics.
Unlike traditional journalists (though clearly not the NYT!) these guys don't have black books of knowledgable people to call up and ask on a certain issue.
Social media makes everyone's opinions and views a lot more equal (when really they shouldn't be) and these stories eventually bubble up to traditional media, which have the view that since the whole "blogosphere" is talking about it as fact; it must be fact.
it is just part of a bigger strategy - text search, book search, audio/video search etc.
youtube is a long term investment. as long as G has money to keep it running/improving, they have nothing to worry about.
may be 5-10 years from now, the same ppl would say that the best investment that google made, is youtube.
OK, so we've got Heroes season 2. Now we have the problem: do people want to pay money for it? Answer: well, no, not if they can get it free on Youtube. Piracy is Youtube's killer app. Unlike the iPod (piracy is the iPod's killer app, too, unless you think 20-somethings are filling 8 GB iPods at $1 a song), Youtube doesn't have plausible deniability or a convenient way to extract money from the pirates.
"Even so, it’s important to remember that Google paid for YouTube in stock, not cash, that represented a tiny fraction of the company’s total market capitalization. (The deal was initially valued at $1.65 billion.) And immediately after the merger was announced, Google’s shares rose, which in some sense seemed to pay for the deal on its own."
much better to just miss breaking even. Shovel all the user data into doubleclick, and all the video data into crazy data mining algorithms.
I can almost picture Steve Ballmer slapping his cheeks with a mocking "Oh, no! Google's dominating yet another money-sucking cost pit! Whatever shall we do?!?!" before bursting out in laughter.
-At Google Search, you do a search and get a text ad. Each text ad is about 400 bytes, each search page (with your results) is around 5k. Serving up the webpage is done from another site.
-At Google YouTube, you do a video search and get a text ad alongside it. Each text ad is 400 bytes, each search result you look at (eg, video) is about 2MB.
So, are you going to make as much, after paying for bandwidth, with a factor of 400 (2,000,000 / 5000) difference in bandwidth?
Now that we're in a bust, what does that tell you about their future prospects?
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/look-ahead-at-google-... http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-6153267-7.html
edit: sorry, that was sorta snarky. and things may have changed since the viacom lawsuit. (it was a subsidiary in late 2008)
Google has one strong source of revenue (search advertising) and has been thrashing about for years in an attempt to build at least a second source without notable success.
Microsoft has many different sources of revenue and continues to build on each. To take out Google, all they have to do is have Bing, Yahoo and the rest patiently chip away at GOOG's search advertising dominance by a few percentage points each year and that revenue will dry up. Then, without that revenue, all of Google's vanity projects will collapse in a heap.
Google's many projects remind me of the Flying Lawnmower: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNWfqVWC2KI
You can make anything fly if you have a strong enough engine shoving it and Google's engine is its search advertising revenue. Once that revenue decreases enough, their lawnmower will fall to earth, and Microsoft is surely happy to see them tack on new expensive doodads like YouTube and Chrome O/S to hurry that day forward.
Google hired several engineers away from Nuance (one of the leaders in voice recognition), and they're working hard on growing their development there.
that is the point I'm trying to make. it is not possible today, I guess it will be possible in future.
how much can you tag? and who will do all the work of tagging? it has to be automated, like text search. video search is going to be much more difficult than text, and G has tons of videos to mine and refine algos.