Video sharing site YouTube seems unstoppable in the current climate. Pete Cashmore reports that the site is delivering up to one million videos a day.
Sceptics have pointed at the YouTube business model, with their lack of advertising, as a prime example of the lack of solid business planning among Web 2.0 startups. How, they wonder, will this site turn users into dollars? Last week, I spoke to Yoav Arnstein, who leads the internet advertising agency Eyecatcher, who thinks the company could have a great future ahead of it. “YouTube has really got itself ready for advertising. With a lot of Web 2.0 startups, brand advertisers won’t touch them because they are scared of appearing next to content that might be illegal or crass. You go to a company like BMW and ask them for money for a consumer-media project and first of all they aren’t interested. But YouTube has really thought ahead. They have removed a lot of the copyrighted content. They put a clear distinction between the things that are suitable for adults and the things for a general audience. Last week they ran advertising for the new Pirates of the Caribbean film. No one knows how much they paid for it, but it shows that the tide is turning from the very fact that Hollywood was able to contemplate such a deal.”
Whether this will be enough to attract image-conscious brands remains to be seen. But brands such as Volkswagen are already submitting their advertisements to the site, and in an era when companies like Chrysler and Coca Cola are asking for users to help generate their advertising, how long will it be before the site becomes an unmissable part of every company’s media mix?
Update 22/7: [from mashable] YouTube is now the world’s fastest growing website, with traffic increasing by 75% last week. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the site grew from 7.3 million to 12.8 million unique visitors – what’s more, traffic is up 297% since January.
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Social tools, devices and web evolution are creating epochal change in media, society and business. The plan is to 
Too much free content = commodization of content
If there is no major value in content then does that mean I should stop blogging?
What it means is that I may start blogging on a Semantic Blog (a blog that allows for semantic annotations on top of the info so that searc can be more intelligent)
I need to write an entry about this.
Marc
To me, it means that if you\’re putting out 1mn videos a month, then that\’s a hell of a lot of bandwidth and the money\’s got to come from somewhere.
Does it mean you should stop blogging? I hope you don\’t, obviously, but if you get so many visits, you\’re having to pay more than you can afford in bandwidth, you won\’t have a choice.
Semantic blog? Is that free internet? In the one I know, you pay, sooner or later.
The only way I pay for content now is by paying my $40/mo. to my broadband ISP, which happens to be my cable company.
So content is free, at least to me. I download Brit comedies (like Spaced, Black Books, Nathan Barley etc) via BitTorrent and I enjoy all the YouTube funnies. Life onlilne couldn’t be any better :)
Semantic Blog = next value layer = intelligent findability.
Content is commoditized. On to the next layer of value. No point in charging for content. Let the ads pay for it.
It’s the net neutrality vs two-tier debate. I wrote about that :)
Marc
I suspect wordpress might have a problem with hosting your blog for free if you were serving a million videos a month. I have no idea what traffic like that costs, but more than you’re going to raise from a few adsense units. Display advertising is probably their only choice. And to get big brands interested – say hollywood – they are going need to be squeaky clean.
I hear they’ve rejected it, but I think adding a 2-second ad to the end of every video would be the best choice. That could be really targeted, measurable, avoids ad blockers and travels with the videos if they’re posted elsewhere. If users grumble because they’re expecting a free ride, then so be it.
Advertising is not going anywhere. It’s here to stay because it’s information. However, the way ads are accessed will change in Web 3.0. Ads won’t be just bits of information. They will be undertsandable to a machine/program hich will make them more useful.
As far as me being able to serve 1 million downloads a month I can do that easily using BitTorrent where I only have to seed the file to be shared and let people download it at my normal bandwidth. The network of peers will then take over as the distributed download server.
So content is commoditized. You can see my first post (back on May 21) regarding peer-assisted content distribution.
Marc
Interesting, and relates to something else I just read. I hadn’t really followed the net neutrality debate, because I saw it as an American thing, but bumped into this post on the Register. The guy on there – an engineer who helped design the net – is an opponent of net neutrality because the amount of clog created by current net traffic breaks the internet, “fills up the tubes” is, I think, the current expression. BitTorrent is a particularly impolite application when it comes to web traffic, it seems. If the owners of the internet have to choose between the success of a legitimate, paid-for service like VOIP and BitTorrent, I can see which is going to win. I don’t like it, but then I don’t own any cables, so that won’t be a consideration.
VOIP is free (courtesy of Skype) … The bandwidth is all paid for. What’s not paid for from the telcos point of view (they’re the ones pushing for two-tier net) is the future expansion of that bandwidth.
I contend that companies like Google (as they mugrate up the value chain of the content business to ‘intelligent content’ or ‘intelligent findability’ as I call it) will build their own backbones. Google is doing that already.
The telcos are entirely redundant. And they don’t like it. They won’t go down without a fight, and the fight is brewing.
Marc