PVR Wire has a good analysis of the YouTube acquisition by Google.
Google itself is already the 3rd busiest site on the internet, and now that it owns YouTube the company has control over a tremendous number of internet users, probably a higher percentage than anyone else!
Here is an Alexa comparison of Google Video and YouTube:
So Google has bought themselves a few eyeballs, since Google Video didn’t perform quite as well:
Putting criticisms aside you need only look a the amount of users and growth of YouTube to see why Google bought them. 20 million regular users, the Top 10 site on the net, and 100 million video views a day.
According to PVRWire there are three main things Google can do now with the new pool of content:
Video adverts in YouTube videos: selling adverts within or rather after the clips of users, preferrably context-sensitive.
Selling premium video, just like on google video.
Licensing content to TV stations like Blib.tv. Actually, a colleague of mine suggested to me today, that Google could start or at least support an extensive TV Network with channels broadcasting those thousands of clips clustered by topic, user votes, relevance, etc. per channel.
Regardless of these benefits, there are two winners these days, and they may look like your average around-the-corner geek, but take care, they’re multi-millionairs now, with only about a year or two worth of work:
The quality is a typical average user quality, with the little mishaps at the end – true user style, I like that. It has been viewed 560,859 times in the last two days, which makes it not top-video (yet), but I am confident they’ll make the top ten of their own site.
Yahoo today announced the launch of what is expected to be the world’s largest time capsule in history. Starting today, Yahoo! is encouraging people from around the world to contribute personal photos, stories, thoughts, ideas, poems, prayers, home movies, music and art to an online anthropology project designed to celebrate and understand life and global culture in 2006. Content from the time capsule will be broadcast directly onto the 216-foot tall Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan and sent into space through a light beam from the historic monument.
Frank Barnako writes about the new prices for advertising on Rocketboom:
Baron said he’s just done a deal worth $80,000 for a week of commercials in his videoblog. Claiming a daily audience of some 300,000 people, Baron could be getting more than a $55 CPM for his ads. You could get a discount, though. He’ll sell you a week of spots for $60,000 – if he likes the commercial content. „
Baron is in the comfortable position to have a videocast with a very high frequency of viewers, yet being under no pressure whatsoever due to lack of relevant competition…
„I’m only going to work with advertisers I want to work with,“ Baron said, „and I’m only going to run ads I like.“
I don’t think he can sustain that position. He has a first mover advantage, but soon enough that will be effectively challenged by all those ambitious video-geeks reading about the money Baron is making. And there will always be some that are successful.
But then again, I do think he can make money by selling exclusive content for a subscription. That is the story of the DVD business. Package your show with exclusive background material and people will pay for it. At least until the first people will start offering this exclusive material for free, all paid for by a sponsor, for example.
Hey, he’s making $4.000 a month on T-Shirts that are advertised badly. There must be something about his target audience, paying for these things…
Techcrunch has an interesting video online: Web 2.0: The 24 Minute Documentary. (Ok, its almost 2 months old, but nevertheless very interesting.)
The topics discussed include:
1. What is Web 2.0?
2. Are we in a bubble?
3. What are the business models that will work on the web today?
4. What is the role of publishers in a user generated world?
5. How important and how big is the early adopter crowd?
There is one thing I would like to recommend to anyone interested in ideas & inspiration. TEDTalks is a podium for remarkable people who have done or are doing remarkable things. In the words of TED itself:
Each year, TED hosts some of the world’s most fascinating people: Trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses. The talks they deliver have had had such a great impact, we thought they deserved a wider audience.
I found a range of fascinating talks there (and I still ain’t finished watching all of them). Sir Ken Robinson, for example is as inspirational as he is funny. Malcolm Gladwell speaks about things he also published in his book „blink“ (his presentation at TED is from 2004). There are also musicians, philosophers and many other people sharing their thoughts.
From a web perspective, there is Mena Trott, who started the blog-software and service company six apart with the software moveable type. And there is also Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia – a site that I increasingly enjoy nowadays. For researching, but also more and more for browsing.
If you want some inspirational ideas and thougts – don’t miss this.
I love it. There is always someone in the whole webosphere, who’s got the time, brains and curiosity to dive deep into things that we can’t be bothered with until we see the results.
This guy here, for example, was wondering about the fact that MySpace has 100 mio users. So he looked at a couple of hundred of them, clustered them, and found out that many profiles are probably abandoned or at least currently inactive.
Whew. Looks like the popular claim that MySpace has 100,000,000 users is hot air. More than 50% can’t even bother to visit again after a month. Based on assuming that type 5 and type 6 are the real ‚users‘ of MySpace, it turns out that MySpace really has roughly 43,000,000 users. Very unscientific? Yep. More accurate than the 100,000,000 myth? Damn straight. The 100,000,000 number is inflated by 133%.
Might be unscientific, but at least he put his data into some nice bar- and pie-charts, which makes a marketeer like myself happy in any case 😉
Wo ich sonst so bin...