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It's fairly straightforward -- use your fountain of money from search ads plus a huge infrastructure to support it to pay the costs rather than pass them on to
by andrewla 2y ago
It's fairly straightforward -- use your fountain of money from search ads plus a huge infrastructure to support it to pay the costs rather than pass them on to users.
Operate at a loss to drive out all competition and prevent new competition from arising. Increase ad obtrusiveness to drive up revenue, and every once in a while increase creator payouts to keep creators on your platform, until hopefully the lines cross and you start to make money. Maybe. Every once in a while a competitor might make a go for it, and you'll have to reduce ads or offer more incentives to creators to drive them out. Sometimes you may have to lobby the government to help you out on this.
One bonus is you can use the goodwill from your video site to drive traffic to your search engine.
If you don't have a fountain of infinite money from your search engine (or if you don't currently operate a gigantic search engine), then you might not be able to pull this off.
- emodendroket 2y agoOK but let's not forget that YouTube was originally an independent offering and Google's own competitor never got off the ground, leading to them just acquiring it.
- andrewla 2y agoThat's true and easy to forget -- at the time, YouTube offered far and above the best experience for content creators and uploaders. And their end-user experience (the flash-based player) was miles ahead of the competition.
- DonnyV 2y agoYes, but they were never profitable and if Google didn't buy them. They probably would of eventually failed or completely change their model to survive. What the original YouTube team did was was create a great brand and experience. Thats why Google's version never took off.
- emodendroket 2y agoThey probably didn't intend to be profitable because their goal was user acquisition at the time. Intending to be profitable from the start would have implied a totally different approach and priorities.
- raydev 2y ago> Google's own competitor never got off the ground, leading to them just acquiring it They only put about 1.5 years of effort into "getting it off the ground" before acquiring YouTube in 2006. I think they just didn't want to try anymore when they knew they could buy the YouTube audience. Of course, GV continued to exist for a few more years because Google, but still. GV always seemed half-assed.
- emodendroket 2y agoIt had a lot of fans because the video itself was of a higher quality than YouTube offered at the time.
- pcchristie 2y agoI really liked the local player that would download videos continuously on my crappy dial up connection. You downloaded a file (a few kb) and it just perpetually downloaded the data until you came back hrs later and it was ready. Man I can't believe I was that patient.
- throwaway5959 2y agoOh so a trust. We need a new Teddy Roosevelt or Taft.