Re: Google/Youtube problems

[Leo Bicknell <bicknell () ufp org>]

In a message written on Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 03:59:22PM +0200, Saku Ytti wrote:
> What I'm trying to say, I can't see youtube generating anywhere nearly
> enough revenue who shift 10% (or more) of Internet. And to explain this
> conundrum to myself, I've speculated accounting magic (which I'd frown
> upon) and leveraging market position to get free capacity (which is ok, I'd
> do the same, had I the leverage)

I suspect you're thinking about revenue in terms of say, the
advertisements they run with the videos.  I beleive you're right, that
would never pay the bills.

Consider a different model.  Google checks out your gmail account, and
discovers you really like Red Bull and from your YouTube profile knows
you watch a lot of Ke$ha videos.  It also discovers there are a lot more
folks with the same profile.  They can now sell that data to a marketing
firm, that there is a strong link between energy drinks and Ke$ha
videos.

GOOG-411 - building a corpus of voice data for Android's voice
recognition.

ReCaptcha - improving visual recognition for their book scanning
process.

Most of the "free" services are simply the cheapest way to get the data
needed for some other service that can make much more money.  It may
seem weird to write off all the costs of YouTube as data aquisition
costs, but there's far more money to be made selling marketing data than
ads against streaming videos...

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell () ufp org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/

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