Kent Newsome on technology, music and life

9/30/2006


YouTube Haters or Bubble Watchers?

Fred Wilson calls for everyone to stop hating YouTube.

I'm certainly not a YouTube hater- it won my Web 2.0 Wars series.  And I agree with Fred that the neatest stuff on YouTube is not the "pirated" stuff that maybe shouldn't be there.  It's the user-created stuff.

But, but, but...

I think the absurd valuations that all of these bubble blowers are trying to associate with YouTube depends in large part on its ability to serve a lot of "pirated" content.

And...

I think we have to make a distinction between people who dislike YouTube in and of itself and people, like me, who only dislike the wildly overinflated valuations that the circus barkers yell at us from inside the greater-fool tent.

YouTube would be a great site, community and service if it didn't have one clip of pirated content.

But it does.  The ironic thing is that most of the content producers weren't really complaining.

Until some dumbass started squawking about how many billions of dollars YouTube is worth.

Why not just sit back and let YouTube try to come up with some revenue streams and then ask them how much money they make?

The answer, of course, is impatience, greed and the complete lack of scale. 

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Posted by Kent @ 9/30/2006 11:07:00 AM | Permalink

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3 Comment(s):

that was the reason i did my "back of the envelope" analysis of what YouTube could make if it served pre-roll ads

i think they'll probably go with post-roll links or ads instead unless the content owners insist on pre-roll in which case they'll let them do that

my gut tells me that youtube can be as big as google, yahoo, ebay, amazon, etc over time (5-10 years) if we wait and watch them build an ad model.

which may well be what happens

fred

By Blogger rightbacktoyou, at 10/01/2006 7:31 AM  
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Why not just sit back and let YouTube try to come up with some revenue streams and then ask them how much money they make?

The thing is, if YT does that, then for absolute sure a large amount of their content would need to be yanked. In short, this would be "reselling" the content, which has been ripped/reposted from say, network TV. Check back to the Harry Fox agency lawsuit against lyrics.ch - and all they did was post lyric sheets (not the original recordings) with banner ads.

By Anonymous Ethan, at 10/01/2006 8:57 AM  
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I guess the problem is that it's hard for some of these developers not to get intoxicated when other people start tossing out huge valuations. I hope the YouTube guys stay the course, because more than any other site, YouTube really has a shot at becoming a material and permanent part of the internet infrastructure.

And unlike Google, which is having a hard time looking for its next big hit, YouTube's next big hit is being created by some user somewhere right now with his video camera.

I remember Lyric.ch- I used to use it all the time. The same thing is happening to the tab sites now.

But these companies are going to slowly realize that the move online is inevitable. When you see the networks start to put their shows online the day they air (that's how I watched Survivor this week), you have to believe there's more to come.

Plus, if we remember the lesson of Lyrics.ch, so do YouTube's potential buyers.

It will be interesting to watch this as it plays out.

By Blogger Kent, at 10/01/2006 10:38 AM  
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