

The Google – Youtube – Conundrum - aminuit
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/06/02/the-google-youtube-conundrum/

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ALee
Man, Mark Cuban and his disdain for YouTube. I don't understand it sometimes.

In general, all of Google's businesses are built to take advantage of large
technological trends. Bandwidth will get cheaper and they have found other
ways to decrease the cost, e.g. having users click on the HQ/HD button.
Fundamentally, Google has always believed that any content out there should
eventually be made free because there will be almost no transaction cost with
technology. The only way to make money off it is through targeted advertising.

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benmathes
His disdain for YouTube comes from founding HDNet (www.hd.net), which is his
play for where video entertainment will be after television. It's definitely
not free.

In other words, he is far from unbiased. He does disclose this in his other
blog postings, though, so he's generally not trying to hide anything but
instead argue why his solution is better.

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steve_mobs
uploads to youtube are growing at an enormous rate and the more google
penetrates into the american and global markets the more the rate will
increase. The question is when will broadband get cheap enough to mitigate
this? and how long is google willing to cover youtube's cost in the short run
until broadband gets cheap enough?

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litewulf
I find this a rather strange article. Flash back in time to before Google was
All-About-Ads:

Google can not keep subsidizing its search users! Clearly they work great, but
the tech demo is over, and its not as effective at selling their corporate
search product as it should be, they need to get out of web search and do X!

Its entirely possible that Google will do something other than "charge users"
to make Youtube profitable, since Google pretty much hasn't done that for any
of their other products.

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aminuit
YouTube probably costs a small fortune, even in Google terms, to keep running.
So I think the question is: how long can they keep running YouTube at a huge
loss before shareholders grow unhappy?

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litewulf
Right. Lets return to my original Google Search analogy. Google Search costs
Google a fortune to run, theres all this indexing and bandwidth and serving
infrastructure thats just being wasted. Remember at the time most people were
looking at Google's enterprise search boxes to be the money bringer.

Sometimes what works is a sideways shift and not "monetize what you're already
doing".

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xsc
Very infrequent YouTube video poster, but watch a few videos a day.

For myself, I don't have a problem paying for hosting. But I'm sure to use it
when it's offered for free.

I'm interested in what Google/YouTube can do for customization, particularly
in the chromeless/API arena. I'd definitely pay for HD chromeless at the right
price.

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andreyf
They already do that, for sure. The latest example I saw was:

<http://www.youtube.com/homeproject>

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zyb09
They could easily just cut 90% of there 20 gigs upload every minute and
absolutly nothing meaningful will be lost.

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benmathes
I agree that 90% of the stuff on youtube is crap not worth looking at.
However, 10% of it is superb. Do you know of an algorithm that can sift the
10% before uploading?

Furthermore, I doubt much bandwidth (youtube->viewer) is wasted on the crap.

