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Lessons Learned from YouTube’s $300M Hole

165 points by replicatorblog 14y ago

nrser 14y ago
i can't imagine Google expected to recoup that capital. i would guess they want YouTube to become TV - all of it. there is a lot of money in TV advertising. it's a company-doubling oppertunity. and they might need TV-quality production to get there. my last start-up was aquired by a major media company. i would guess $5M was the smallest amount of money they could get them to pay attention to.
OGinparadise 14y ago
YouTube is a young company, it does not need to convert 100% of its value to dollars. Please, let the advertisers figure out for themselves how to tackle this very new medium instead of trying to shape the medium to meet their needs. Yeah but there's no Youtube, it was sold to Google, a 14-15 year old and publicly traded company. As for advertisers and ads, Google is an ad agency so they'll probably not going to take your advice.
- cloudwalking 14y ago
  Actually, YouTube is fairly independent within Google. And Google is more of a software company with an internal ad agency.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    It's pretty clear from their income statements going back to the invention of AdWords and AdSense that Google is an advertising company that dabbles in software on the side. 2010: - Advertising Revenue: $28.2B - Other Revenue: $1B 2011: - Advertising Revenue: $36.5B - Other Revenue: $1.3B 2012 (unaudited): - Advertising Revenue: $43.6B - Other Revenue: $2.3B Travel allll the way back to 2001, the earliest figures Google has published. Guess what the revenue split looks like? Yep: still an advertising company. 2001: - Advertising Revenue: $66.9M - Other Revenue: $19.4M If anything has changed it's that Google has steadily become more of an advertising company. Like Newscorp, the stuff you think they do (search/services vs news/commentary) is not actually what they get paid to do. Both Google and Newscorp make their money by using getting people to look at ads.
    - cromwellian 14y ago
      The vast majority of employees at Google work on stuff unrelated to AdWords and AdSense, they work on technology, and get paid to do it and are not told to come up with new ideas for showing more ads. A tiny minority of people rake in money on ads, which frees up the vast majority of engineers to work on other stuff. AdWords and AdSense scale, they simply don't need an army of employees to maintain them, Google doesn't need 15,000 employees all working on ad serving. Like the vast vast vast majority of all consumer facing internet businesses ever created since the dawn of the Web, Google was created to do something: Search, without any clear business plan about how to make money. Most Web businesses do not charge end user fees, they are founded to get users, and either make money from ads, or get acquired by those that do. Facebook: Ads. Twitter: Ads. Yahoo: Ads. New York Times? Ads. You really think the journalists at the New York Times view themselves as working at an advertising company because that's the only way they can get paid? You think it's accurate to describe the New York Times as an Ad Agency? Much rarer do we see people saying "Facebook is just an ad company" in forums, this charge is always lobbed at Google, which says to me that there's some intellectual dishonesty going on, people with an axe to grind. Google spent nearly $7 billion on R&D in 2013. Most of this spending is targeted not at ads, but in trying to develop other lines of business with diversified revenue sources. Larry Page is not an idiot, he sees that relying on ads for 97% of your revenue is a risky proposition. It just turns out to be a hard problem to get people to pay for content now, even on mobile you can see prices being driven down to free + freemium. Unless Google wants to be an Enterprise company like Oracle (a market where people have a proven track record of throwing money at stuff), it's at the mercy of what people are willing to do, and as shown over and over again, people like get stuff for free if paid for by others (ads). Even for HBO and some other channels, the majority of media people consume, even that on "for pay" cable TV is still funded by commercial ads. You take a TV show which has a $2 million per episode budget, and you need a atleast 2 million people per week to pay $1. Now, how likely is that when many shows can't even command an audience of 1 million free viewers.
      - OGinparadise 14y ago
        The number of employees on each department, even if you knew it, is totally irrelevant. NY Times is a newspaper and totally different from Google which has Adsense, Doubleclick and Adwords. Google essentially controls online advertising and 95+% of their revenue is from....ads! Now with Google going 100% pay-to-play on eCommerce and transactional keywords it's even more of an ad company (milking the search goodwill.) You can call them whatever you want of course
  - onemorepassword 14y ago
    Seems to me like the past year YouTube is being swallowed by Google+. (And with that, by the advertising company that Google so obviously has become.) Especially the way in which users are pressured into using their "real name" and the dramatic shift in discover/recommendations (from content-based to social-based) seems more than just a matter of integration. Both are things that are the opposite of what YouTube was about a until recently. Google is all about advertising. Software is just a means to that end.
  - bdowney 14y ago
    No it isn't. It's been asked, like many other parts of the company, to integrate with the Google+ crap. How is that independent? About the article, 300m is just pocket change for Google anyway, they blew 12 billion on Motorola just to get the patents, so 300 million is not going to make a difference for them even if it fails miserably.
    - cloudwalking 14y ago
      Actually they blew $12 billion on Motorola for a hardware manufacturing company (tooling, personnel, supply chain, patents, etc), and $6 billion in cash.
- CurtMonash 14y ago
  Google's main, eponymous business is a service that is monetized via ads. That business shares some of its technology with two other efforts: 1. Google's efforts to monetize those ads. 2. Google's efforts to monetize other ads. None of this invalidates a claim that Google typically fits the "users first, dollars second" stereotype. Android fits that stereotype too; ditto Google Apps.
lalos 14y ago
Online video isn’t about how good it looks, it’s about how good it is. People who make online video are much better at making online video than people who make TV shows When people go to youtube the bar is set quite low, they don't expect the same as when they watch a show from a well established TV network that has a brand to protect and pristine "quality" to portray. That would be a good reason of whey this type of funding did not work out.
sophacles 14y ago
Completely unrelated: 13 paragraphs, 4 of which are single simple sentences, and the longest of them is 72 words, qualifies an apology for "wall of text" now? This makes both very sad and very angry.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- eggbrain 14y ago
  I guess when your content width is 400px, 200 words is all you need to make it a wall of text and push it past the fold.
- mvarner 14y ago
  This was posted on Tumblr, which is generally known for its short attention span, and the blogger has a large contingent of younger fans, who may not be interested in reading about Youtube and would prefer to continue viewing cute cat gifs. That being said, I didn't realize that YouTube was funding original channels! I'm reminded of the talk Dan Harmon (creator of the television series "Community") gave regarding the death of television/the Internet as a new platform for stories [1]. The majority of people already consume television shows on the internet, I'd love to see a larger shift towards an internet-only tv series model. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ej_aFOnT04g http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e...
  - untog 14y ago
    That's never easy, though. Just like newspapers before it, TV show creators will discover that internet advertising doesn't attract anywhere near the premiums of TV advertising. So you have to find alternative revenue streams, which isn't always easy.
    - faboo 14y ago
      I've wondered for a while if the price for television advertising was/is inflated due to the fact that there's no way to track its impact. Web advertisements usually pay per click these days, which at least measures some kind of engagement, and yet advertisers apparently pay significantly less for it in aggregate than they do television advertising, which seems backward to me.
treelovinhippie 14y ago
Related note, I tried to sell Hank scishow.com sometime last year but was told they had no cash before we'd even got to discussing figures. I would have thought they'd be pulling in decent revenues across the network
- notatoad 14y ago
  he refers to the funding as an "advance" that he doesn't expect to earn out for three years - i'm guessing that means he's not pulling in any revenue from youtube, as they've already paid him.
TimSchumann 14y ago
Who is this guy? I'm trying to find other stuff he's done but I can't find his Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, anything... Tumblr does frustrate me...
- samarudge 14y ago
  http://youtube.com/vlogbrothers http://youtube.com/vlogbrothers http://youtube.com/crashcourse http://youtube.com/crashcourse http://youtube.com/scishow http://youtube.com/scishow http://twitter.com/hankgreen http://twitter.com/hankgreen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Green http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Green (In addition to that, he's also my employer, but that might not be relevant to you)
  - TimSchumann 14y ago
    Thanks Sam. While not directly relevant, your employment is probably how you can afford to answer the questions of social-media-know-nothings like myself on the internet. Tumblr frustrates me because I'm not 'in the stream' so to speak. The whole thing seems to be designed to just whisk you away to more Tumblrs. That could be great, but when you arrive at a page and have no clue who penned the words you're looking at or where you can go to find more of their work... it borders on infuriating. Anyway, the reason I asked is I liked the post and found it tangentially relevant to a project I'm working on with a friend. Gave me a new way of thinking about a few things. So again, Thank You.
    - samarudge 14y ago
      Yeah Tumblr can be silly. I've been into Tumblr for a while, and prior to about 6 months ago it was nearly impossible to find the original source of something without trawling through pages of "notes". Some people put links to twitter/other social networks on their blogs but since probably >99% of the visitors to Hank's blog will get there from somewhere else in his network (Twitter, Youtube or any one of our number of community sites). So yeah, don't feel to bad, Tumblr confuses even those of us who consider ourselves "social-media competent"
- 14y ago
nrser 14y ago
i can't imagine Google expected to recoup that capital. i would guess they want YouTube to become TV - all of it. there is a lot of money in TV advertising. it's a company-doubling oppertunity. and they might need TV-quality production to get there. my last start-up was aquired by a major media company. i would guess $5M was the smallest amount of money they could get them to pay attention to.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ohwp 14y ago
To me the message here is: it's all about content. And a lot of people underestimate this. A beautiful website without good content is worth nothing (well maybe it's worth inspiration for designers). A newspaper without content is worth gossip and sensation. That's why some blogs are better than high profile newspapers and that's why some home made Youtube movies provide more information (and are thus better) than big money productions.
- ziadbc 14y ago
  It was really the exact opposite of that. The thesis was exactly that, it's all about the content, so get the best content creators in the world. It turned out to be all about the medium, and there are still only a few people who know what do in the medium of online video.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - ohwp 14y ago
    Maybe I read it wrong, but to me it sounded like: we got the best content creators, but they only could make beautiful content. All the amateurs were creating the best content.
  - darkchasma 14y ago
    This failed as an experiment in the same way mythbusters gets Adam to scale a building, and he can't get to a second floor with suction cups, and deems it a myth. All the while we have a french guy that is scaling skyscrapers with only his hands and getting arrested for that the very same weekend.
mattryanharris 14y ago
Never thought I would see Hank Green on the front page of HN but hey there's a first time for everything! Hank has a great point, YouTube is all about quality content! They need to invest in people that know how YouTube works not Hollywood. It takes a fresh and open perspective to understand a YouTube audience. I'm 19 and I've been making videos since the age of 15 and you learn so much about interaction and branding but you never forget that you're just some guy talking to a camera...WHICH IS PRETTY RELATABLE! I'm sorry I think I went on a random rant. MY POINT: YouTube always should be supporting their original content creators, not trying to help all these new companies become big and successful. There is a reason I watch TV and a reason I watch YouTube. I don't need both on one platform. Alright, done.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  > YouTube is all about quality content As generalisations go, I feel this one falls between sweeping and wildly optimistic. 99.9% of the stuff on youtube is utter bilge. I find a lot of useful resources; but thanks to the magic of social media I get to see the titles of a lot of LOOK AT THIS KITTEN and OMG CAR CRASH videos too.
  - mattryanharris 14y ago
    I feel ya but when I meant quality content I should've been more specific. Hank and John Green have been making awesome quality content for YouTube whether it be the Lizzie Bennet Diaries or Crash Course or the Brain Scoop. This example also includes Philip Defranco who created SourceFed and many more content creators working on their shows.
inkaudio 14y ago
Quality matters everywhere, quality matters on T.V. and online. 300 million is like the budget of a handful of popular T.V. shows. Game of Thrones has a budget of about 60 million a season, House of Cards cost about 100 million. 300 million spread across hundreds of channels is not going to give you the best of T.V. The T.V. networks make big bets on a smaller number of shows. Time Warner alone has over a billion dollar budget for their content. It’s really high risk, high reward for them and I don’t think it is something Google is ready to stomach. The budget would have been better spent on more educational programming, which T.V. channels offer very little of. Educational programming is popular on Youtube and other sites.
- rdl 14y ago
  Most of the channels were educational or news or other special interest, not sitcom, drama, etc. I think the issue is just cost -- high-end TV is $250k-3mm/hr . Low-quality TV costs something like $30k/hr of finished product. High-end web is $1-4k/hr. Amateur is $100-400. You can produce much more niche content if you need only $1k/hr to produce it. Niche reduces the cost per hour for the same quality, too -- I'd rather see dmor or sama or garry talking about startups for 15 minutes vs. Morgan Freeman. Non-talent costs really can be dramatically reduced in a non-union world, especially one where the principals are compensated through equity or other non-cash, for the same final quality. And, if something is niche, I'll watch it even if the editing, sound, video, etc. aren't quite up to the same level.
  - inkaudio 14y ago
    -> Most of the channels were educational or news or other special interest... There was a lot of news and special interest but throwing Educational programming into the mix is not factually correct. I have two list, one from 2011 and one recent. Both show an emphasis on Entertainment and Extracurricular programming. Recent: http://www.youtube.com/yt/advertise/original-channels.html http://www.youtube.com/yt/advertise/original-channels.html From 2011: http://www.tubefilter.com/2011/10/28/youtube-original-channels/ http://www.tubefilter.com/2011/10/28/youtube-original-channe... Not too many pure educational programming plays. Certainly not the majority. ->Non-talent costs really can be dramatically reduced in a non-union world... Producing content is like anything else you have to make, a lot of times you get what you pay. I've worked with a lot of new workers, the good ones rise to professional level pretty fast and they won't work for equity/portfolio for too long. I think Youtube has gone as far as it can go with cheap content, which is pretty good. Now they are experimenting.
meisterbrendan 14y ago
This is an essential quote: "Please, let the advertisers figure out for themselves how to tackle this very new medium instead of trying to shape the medium to meet their needs." Forgetting the rest of the article, I think this point is really salient to the way lots of valuable web services are evolving right now.

165 points by replicatorblog 14y ago

nrser 14y ago

i can't imagine Google expected to recoup that capital. i would guess they want YouTube to become TV - all of it. there is a lot of money in TV advertising. it's a company-doubling oppertunity. and they might need TV-quality production to get there. my last start-up was aquired by a major media company. i would guess $5M was the smallest amount of money they could get them to pay attention to.

OGinparadise 14y ago

YouTube is a young company, it does not need to convert 100% of its value to dollars. Please, let the advertisers figure out for themselves how to tackle this very new medium instead of trying to shape the medium to meet their needs. Yeah but there's no Youtube, it was sold to Google, a 14-15 year old and publicly traded company. As for advertisers and ads, Google is an ad agency so they'll probably not going to take your advice.

cloudwalking 14y ago
Actually, YouTube is fairly independent within Google. And Google is more of a software company with an internal ad agency.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  It's pretty clear from their income statements going back to the invention of AdWords and AdSense that Google is an advertising company that dabbles in software on the side. 2010: - Advertising Revenue: $28.2B - Other Revenue: $1B 2011: - Advertising Revenue: $36.5B - Other Revenue: $1.3B 2012 (unaudited): - Advertising Revenue: $43.6B - Other Revenue: $2.3B Travel allll the way back to 2001, the earliest figures Google has published. Guess what the revenue split looks like? Yep: still an advertising company. 2001: - Advertising Revenue: $66.9M - Other Revenue: $19.4M If anything has changed it's that Google has steadily become more of an advertising company. Like Newscorp, the stuff you think they do (search/services vs news/commentary) is not actually what they get paid to do. Both Google and Newscorp make their money by using getting people to look at ads.
  - cromwellian 14y ago
    The vast majority of employees at Google work on stuff unrelated to AdWords and AdSense, they work on technology, and get paid to do it and are not told to come up with new ideas for showing more ads. A tiny minority of people rake in money on ads, which frees up the vast majority of engineers to work on other stuff. AdWords and AdSense scale, they simply don't need an army of employees to maintain them, Google doesn't need 15,000 employees all working on ad serving. Like the vast vast vast majority of all consumer facing internet businesses ever created since the dawn of the Web, Google was created to do something: Search, without any clear business plan about how to make money. Most Web businesses do not charge end user fees, they are founded to get users, and either make money from ads, or get acquired by those that do. Facebook: Ads. Twitter: Ads. Yahoo: Ads. New York Times? Ads. You really think the journalists at the New York Times view themselves as working at an advertising company because that's the only way they can get paid? You think it's accurate to describe the New York Times as an Ad Agency? Much rarer do we see people saying "Facebook is just an ad company" in forums, this charge is always lobbed at Google, which says to me that there's some intellectual dishonesty going on, people with an axe to grind. Google spent nearly $7 billion on R&D in 2013. Most of this spending is targeted not at ads, but in trying to develop other lines of business with diversified revenue sources. Larry Page is not an idiot, he sees that relying on ads for 97% of your revenue is a risky proposition. It just turns out to be a hard problem to get people to pay for content now, even on mobile you can see prices being driven down to free + freemium. Unless Google wants to be an Enterprise company like Oracle (a market where people have a proven track record of throwing money at stuff), it's at the mercy of what people are willing to do, and as shown over and over again, people like get stuff for free if paid for by others (ads). Even for HBO and some other channels, the majority of media people consume, even that on "for pay" cable TV is still funded by commercial ads. You take a TV show which has a $2 million per episode budget, and you need a atleast 2 million people per week to pay $1. Now, how likely is that when many shows can't even command an audience of 1 million free viewers.
    - OGinparadise 14y ago
      The number of employees on each department, even if you knew it, is totally irrelevant. NY Times is a newspaper and totally different from Google which has Adsense, Doubleclick and Adwords. Google essentially controls online advertising and 95+% of their revenue is from....ads! Now with Google going 100% pay-to-play on eCommerce and transactional keywords it's even more of an ad company (milking the search goodwill.) You can call them whatever you want of course
- onemorepassword 14y ago
  Seems to me like the past year YouTube is being swallowed by Google+. (And with that, by the advertising company that Google so obviously has become.) Especially the way in which users are pressured into using their "real name" and the dramatic shift in discover/recommendations (from content-based to social-based) seems more than just a matter of integration. Both are things that are the opposite of what YouTube was about a until recently. Google is all about advertising. Software is just a means to that end.
- bdowney 14y ago
  No it isn't. It's been asked, like many other parts of the company, to integrate with the Google+ crap. How is that independent? About the article, 300m is just pocket change for Google anyway, they blew 12 billion on Motorola just to get the patents, so 300 million is not going to make a difference for them even if it fails miserably.
  - cloudwalking 14y ago
    Actually they blew $12 billion on Motorola for a hardware manufacturing company (tooling, personnel, supply chain, patents, etc), and $6 billion in cash.
CurtMonash 14y ago
Google's main, eponymous business is a service that is monetized via ads. That business shares some of its technology with two other efforts: 1. Google's efforts to monetize those ads. 2. Google's efforts to monetize other ads. None of this invalidates a claim that Google typically fits the "users first, dollars second" stereotype. Android fits that stereotype too; ditto Google Apps.

lalos 14y ago

Online video isn’t about how good it looks, it’s about how good it is. People who make online video are much better at making online video than people who make TV shows When people go to youtube the bar is set quite low, they don't expect the same as when they watch a show from a well established TV network that has a brand to protect and pristine "quality" to portray. That would be a good reason of whey this type of funding did not work out.

sophacles 14y ago

Completely unrelated: 13 paragraphs, 4 of which are single simple sentences, and the longest of them is 72 words, qualifies an apology for "wall of text" now? This makes both very sad and very angry.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
eggbrain 14y ago
I guess when your content width is 400px, 200 words is all you need to make it a wall of text and push it past the fold.
mvarner 14y ago
This was posted on Tumblr, which is generally known for its short attention span, and the blogger has a large contingent of younger fans, who may not be interested in reading about Youtube and would prefer to continue viewing cute cat gifs. That being said, I didn't realize that YouTube was funding original channels! I'm reminded of the talk Dan Harmon (creator of the television series "Community") gave regarding the death of television/the Internet as a new platform for stories [1]. The majority of people already consume television shows on the internet, I'd love to see a larger shift towards an internet-only tv series model. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ej_aFOnT04g http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e...
- untog 14y ago
  That's never easy, though. Just like newspapers before it, TV show creators will discover that internet advertising doesn't attract anywhere near the premiums of TV advertising. So you have to find alternative revenue streams, which isn't always easy.
  - faboo 14y ago
    I've wondered for a while if the price for television advertising was/is inflated due to the fact that there's no way to track its impact. Web advertisements usually pay per click these days, which at least measures some kind of engagement, and yet advertisers apparently pay significantly less for it in aggregate than they do television advertising, which seems backward to me.

treelovinhippie 14y ago

Related note, I tried to sell Hank scishow.com sometime last year but was told they had no cash before we'd even got to discussing figures. I would have thought they'd be pulling in decent revenues across the network

notatoad 14y ago
he refers to the funding as an "advance" that he doesn't expect to earn out for three years - i'm guessing that means he's not pulling in any revenue from youtube, as they've already paid him.

TimSchumann 14y ago

Who is this guy? I'm trying to find other stuff he's done but I can't find his Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, anything... Tumblr does frustrate me...

samarudge 14y ago
http://youtube.com/vlogbrothers http://youtube.com/vlogbrothers http://youtube.com/crashcourse http://youtube.com/crashcourse http://youtube.com/scishow http://youtube.com/scishow http://twitter.com/hankgreen http://twitter.com/hankgreen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Green http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Green (In addition to that, he's also my employer, but that might not be relevant to you)
- TimSchumann 14y ago
  Thanks Sam. While not directly relevant, your employment is probably how you can afford to answer the questions of social-media-know-nothings like myself on the internet. Tumblr frustrates me because I'm not 'in the stream' so to speak. The whole thing seems to be designed to just whisk you away to more Tumblrs. That could be great, but when you arrive at a page and have no clue who penned the words you're looking at or where you can go to find more of their work... it borders on infuriating. Anyway, the reason I asked is I liked the post and found it tangentially relevant to a project I'm working on with a friend. Gave me a new way of thinking about a few things. So again, Thank You.
  - samarudge 14y ago
    Yeah Tumblr can be silly. I've been into Tumblr for a while, and prior to about 6 months ago it was nearly impossible to find the original source of something without trawling through pages of "notes". Some people put links to twitter/other social networks on their blogs but since probably >99% of the visitors to Hank's blog will get there from somewhere else in his network (Twitter, Youtube or any one of our number of community sites). So yeah, don't feel to bad, Tumblr confuses even those of us who consider ourselves "social-media competent"
14y ago

nrser 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ohwp 14y ago

To me the message here is: it's all about content. And a lot of people underestimate this. A beautiful website without good content is worth nothing (well maybe it's worth inspiration for designers). A newspaper without content is worth gossip and sensation. That's why some blogs are better than high profile newspapers and that's why some home made Youtube movies provide more information (and are thus better) than big money productions.

ziadbc 14y ago
It was really the exact opposite of that. The thesis was exactly that, it's all about the content, so get the best content creators in the world. It turned out to be all about the medium, and there are still only a few people who know what do in the medium of online video.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- ohwp 14y ago
  Maybe I read it wrong, but to me it sounded like: we got the best content creators, but they only could make beautiful content. All the amateurs were creating the best content.
- darkchasma 14y ago
  This failed as an experiment in the same way mythbusters gets Adam to scale a building, and he can't get to a second floor with suction cups, and deems it a myth. All the while we have a french guy that is scaling skyscrapers with only his hands and getting arrested for that the very same weekend.

mattryanharris 14y ago

Never thought I would see Hank Green on the front page of HN but hey there's a first time for everything! Hank has a great point, YouTube is all about quality content! They need to invest in people that know how YouTube works not Hollywood. It takes a fresh and open perspective to understand a YouTube audience. I'm 19 and I've been making videos since the age of 15 and you learn so much about interaction and branding but you never forget that you're just some guy talking to a camera...WHICH IS PRETTY RELATABLE! I'm sorry I think I went on a random rant. MY POINT: YouTube always should be supporting their original content creators, not trying to help all these new companies become big and successful. There is a reason I watch TV and a reason I watch YouTube. I don't need both on one platform. Alright, done.

jacques_chester 14y ago
> YouTube is all about quality content As generalisations go, I feel this one falls between sweeping and wildly optimistic. 99.9% of the stuff on youtube is utter bilge. I find a lot of useful resources; but thanks to the magic of social media I get to see the titles of a lot of LOOK AT THIS KITTEN and OMG CAR CRASH videos too.
- mattryanharris 14y ago
  I feel ya but when I meant quality content I should've been more specific. Hank and John Green have been making awesome quality content for YouTube whether it be the Lizzie Bennet Diaries or Crash Course or the Brain Scoop. This example also includes Philip Defranco who created SourceFed and many more content creators working on their shows.

inkaudio 14y ago

Quality matters everywhere, quality matters on T.V. and online. 300 million is like the budget of a handful of popular T.V. shows. Game of Thrones has a budget of about 60 million a season, House of Cards cost about 100 million. 300 million spread across hundreds of channels is not going to give you the best of T.V. The T.V. networks make big bets on a smaller number of shows. Time Warner alone has over a billion dollar budget for their content. It’s really high risk, high reward for them and I don’t think it is something Google is ready to stomach. The budget would have been better spent on more educational programming, which T.V. channels offer very little of. Educational programming is popular on Youtube and other sites.

rdl 14y ago
Most of the channels were educational or news or other special interest, not sitcom, drama, etc. I think the issue is just cost -- high-end TV is $250k-3mm/hr . Low-quality TV costs something like $30k/hr of finished product. High-end web is $1-4k/hr. Amateur is $100-400. You can produce much more niche content if you need only $1k/hr to produce it. Niche reduces the cost per hour for the same quality, too -- I'd rather see dmor or sama or garry talking about startups for 15 minutes vs. Morgan Freeman. Non-talent costs really can be dramatically reduced in a non-union world, especially one where the principals are compensated through equity or other non-cash, for the same final quality. And, if something is niche, I'll watch it even if the editing, sound, video, etc. aren't quite up to the same level.
- inkaudio 14y ago
  -> Most of the channels were educational or news or other special interest... There was a lot of news and special interest but throwing Educational programming into the mix is not factually correct. I have two list, one from 2011 and one recent. Both show an emphasis on Entertainment and Extracurricular programming. Recent: http://www.youtube.com/yt/advertise/original-channels.html http://www.youtube.com/yt/advertise/original-channels.html From 2011: http://www.tubefilter.com/2011/10/28/youtube-original-channels/ http://www.tubefilter.com/2011/10/28/youtube-original-channe... Not too many pure educational programming plays. Certainly not the majority. ->Non-talent costs really can be dramatically reduced in a non-union world... Producing content is like anything else you have to make, a lot of times you get what you pay. I've worked with a lot of new workers, the good ones rise to professional level pretty fast and they won't work for equity/portfolio for too long. I think Youtube has gone as far as it can go with cheap content, which is pretty good. Now they are experimenting.

meisterbrendan 14y ago

This is an essential quote: "Please, let the advertisers figure out for themselves how to tackle this very new medium instead of trying to shape the medium to meet their needs." Forgetting the rest of the article, I think this point is really salient to the way lots of valuable web services are evolving right now.