slate.com— Do to its tremendous bandwidth costs -- and relatively menial advertisement revenue -- YouTube, owned by Google, is losing $500 million per year. Free internet video may become a relic soon enough.
Apr 15, 2009View in Crawl 4
Very informative & thorough article; and agree with piexlate - the Digg headline is way off the mark. The article simply explains how running sites such as YouTube or Flickr, with user-generated content, is a bit of a financial sinkhole.
Let's not underestimate the power of shock value in headlines. I could bet not too many people would check this on Digg if it featured the original title. A scientific news on asteroids in orbit, for example, will always become something like "OMG BIG ROCK IS GONNA HIT EARTH WE'RE GONNA DIE!!!11!!!" on Digg. But to get back in topic - yes, YouTube free-for-all feast may be coming soon to a close if it keeps being unprofitable for Google, even as we'd like to think that $100 million for Google is like a buck for us. The only saving grace of this would be much less brain-damaging, stupid videos around the web. But at what price?
pixelate- The article is correct in that Google has been locating it's new server facilities in rural areas with much lower real estate and electrical utility costs (and it is even getting into the alternative energy business) so Google managers are paying attention to the costs of running all their businesses.I have observed YouTube and MySpace users and they spend all their time scrolling through pages, it does not appear that they are looking for anything but entertainment, but will they be willing to pay for it in the future?I think that online "newspapers" make a lot more money and they are adding more videos to follow the trend, but will probably go back to text when the videos prove unprofitable.Newspapers take positions on the issues that affect Americans jobs:<a class="user" href="http://www.communati.com/steve-lee/think-wall-street">http://www.communati.com/steve-lee/think-wall-stre ...</a>
I liked reading the part of how 'amazing' Google engineers are. This article, if nothing else, makes me want to add data compression to my future research. Very inspirational. Thanks!
skatoolakiApr 15, 2009
Very informative & thorough article; and agree with piexlate - the Digg headline is way off the mark. The article simply explains how running sites such as YouTube or Flickr, with user-generated content, is a bit of a financial sinkhole.
betobetoApr 16, 2009
Let's not underestimate the power of shock value in headlines. I could bet not too many people would check this on Digg if it featured the original title. A scientific news on asteroids in orbit, for example, will always become something like "OMG BIG ROCK IS GONNA HIT EARTH WE'RE GONNA DIE!!!11!!!" on Digg. But to get back in topic - yes, YouTube free-for-all feast may be coming soon to a close if it keeps being unprofitable for Google, even as we'd like to think that $100 million for Google is like a buck for us. The only saving grace of this would be much less brain-damaging, stupid videos around the web. But at what price?
stevelectricApr 18, 2009
pixelate- The article is correct in that Google has been locating it's new server facilities in rural areas with much lower real estate and electrical utility costs (and it is even getting into the alternative energy business) so Google managers are paying attention to the costs of running all their businesses.I have observed YouTube and MySpace users and they spend all their time scrolling through pages, it does not appear that they are looking for anything but entertainment, but will they be willing to pay for it in the future?I think that online "newspapers" make a lot more money and they are adding more videos to follow the trend, but will probably go back to text when the videos prove unprofitable.Newspapers take positions on the issues that affect Americans jobs:<a class="user" href="http://www.communati.com/steve-lee/think-wall-street">http://www.communati.com/steve-lee/think-wall-stre ...</a>
Closed AccountApr 18, 2009
I liked reading the part of how 'amazing' Google engineers are. This article, if nothing else, makes me want to add data compression to my future research. Very inspirational. Thanks!