Legal Research

Don’t Be Coy … Tell Us What You Really Think

Here’s the first paragraph of a Silicon Valley Insider post titled “YouTube Is Doomed“:

“YouTube, that incandescent tower of video Babel; monument to the sloughed-off detritus of our exponentially-exploding digital culture; a Technicolor cataract of skateboarding dogs, lip-synching college students, political punditry, and porn; has reached the zenith of its meteoric rise; and Icarus-like, wings melting; is spiraling back to earth. Despite massive growth, ubiquitous global brand awareness, presidential endorsement, and the world’s greatest repository of illegally-pirated video content, Google’s massive video folly is on life-support, and the prognosis is grave.”

Nothing like starting off with a bang.

And, for YouTube/Google, it’s all downhill from there. YouTube is projected to lose $470 million this year. Monetization via ads, though growing ($240 million), isn’t enough. As the site expands, especially through user-generated content, costs will rise much faster than ad revenues. Thus, Google has a choice: limit YouTube to professional content suitable for ad placement (bad) or make some or all of it a subscription site (worse).

That’s the problem with being a ubiquitous meteoric incandescently Technicolor monument: at the end of the day, you gotta pay the bills.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on April 09, 2009 (boomark / email).