> I had assumed that they're trying their absolute hardest not to > lose half a billion dollars and that they haven't been able to make it > work yet. But perhaps you're right and they are indeed shackled by a > GM-like existing situation with YouTube and don't know how to fix it.
First off, having worked at Google, I know for a fact they're willing to let a project bleed a little while they figure out what to do. It can be as simple as their current model was an attempt that didn't work. I'm not trying to call them GM so much as to just say that Google is not the end all of online video. > And you're also right that I hadn't considered that YouTube would just > end because it doesn't work - as the third most popular website, and > something that Google paid $1.7bn for, I didn't see that coming about > any time soon. But with these kind of losses, maybe it will. Unless > they can find another way to fund all that bandwidth from those tiny > amounts of viewers that advertisers aren't interested in - bandwidth > that they're already paying well below market rate for. Well, I definitely think that Google would seriously lose face if they didn't find a way to keep YouTube. They will not do that unless they have to. However, online video exists beyond YouTube and I'd argue it's the stuff beyond YouTube that's got the best chance at making real money. Others on here have noted some very simple ideas like a "YouTube Business" site...nobody is doing this, and they need to. > I wasn't talking about Micropayment systems for direct payment, though > - I was talking about the kind of dollar payments that people pay for > media in places like the iTunes store. Yes, but as Clay Shirky points out, iTunes doesn't work because it competes in the marketplace. It succeeds because it stays separate from a free market in online media. Furthermore, the popularity of online video right now is in its ability to be linked, embedded, and discussed. If we were to micropay for videos, then I'd be paying money for following links. I'll stop following them or I'll join groups to circumvent that wall. This already happened with online text for the New York Times. That model went over poorly for them, and all you had to do was sign up for a lousy account. > I don't know what that content is, and I'd assumed that the vast > majority of the most monetizable commercial online video is published > on YouTube as well as wherever else it might go, just to capture the > audiences. So I didn't really understand the difference between the > most monetizable online video and YouTube. IMHO, The Escapist (http://www.escapistmag.com) has one of the best online video systems going. Zero Punctuation and Unskippable are hits, they have plenty of internal ads which likely pay somewhat well, and they drive their own merchandise sales. > But you're probably right, there are probably lots of other options > that I hadn't considered which mean that advertising in online video > will suddenly become very successful and ubiquitous and pay per view > won't become the dominant model for funding it all as I'd suggested. It's worth remembering that advertising works in TV and print because television shows and popular publications are *co-created* with the advertising. That is, the content is designed to work well with advertisers, and the advertisements are tuned to work well with the content. You just can't do this in the YouTube model. At a place like The Escapist (or even a person's non-YouTube video blog), you can. -- Rhett http://www.weatherlight.com
