What Could YouTube Be Worth? 139
An anonymous reader writes "C|Net has a story about the possible cost of YouTube. Sony just paid $65 Million for small-time videosharing outfit 'Grouper'. That site has around 1% of the videosharing market. The article asks, at that price, what might YouTube's 43% be worth?" From the article: "Entertainment analysts have predicted in recent weeks that sites with large followings would command a high price. The Sony deal proved them right. But while the Grouper deal helped establish a benchmark, there is still plenty of confusion about the fair value of online video companies. This is because the typical metrics for measuring a company appear to have gone out the window--just like they did during the bubble years of the late 1990s."
Way to make money ... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Copy YouTube idea
2. Rename it PornTube
3. ???
4. Profit !!
Done and (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Way to make money ... (Score:5, Informative)
You mean just like xtube is doing ?
http://www.xtube.com/ [xtube.com]
Re:Way to make money ... (Score:5, Funny)
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If someone couldn't figure out that a porn version of YouTube wasn't SFW, they probably aren't smart enough to hold a job at a place with Internet access, they'd be serving fries or washing cars. Oh well, I suppose fair warning could have been useful for people visiting it through meta-mod?
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They have logins for manywebsites of all categories.
If if there isn't a login, they supply you with websites that allow you to create temporary email accounts.
Re:Way to make money ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Way to make money ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Way to make money ... (Score:5, Funny)
What'd you think 'tube' meant?
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Internet?
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The Internet...duh!
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Not that I would know about such things, mind.
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I mean, they're just videos of cute teenage girls jumping around that you only need 3-5 minutes with.
Oh. Never mind.
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Great ideea ... (Score:1)
$2,795,000,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony just paid $65 Million for small-time videosharing outfit 'Grouper'. That site has around 1% of the videosharing market. The article asks, at that price, what might YouTube's 43% be worth?
I would think the answer is $65m * 43 = $2,795,000,000.
Re:$2,795,000,000 (Score:5, Funny)
Dollars.
Canadian dollars.
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1 Tank of Gas (Score:1)
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Let me save you the click: .
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Which is 2.5% of Google, or 12% of CBS (Score:2)
2.8 billion is around 2.5% of Google's market cap. If you asked a Wall Street analyst if they attributed 2.5% of Google's market cap to Google Video, they'd might say yes, based on the hopes that Google will be able to monetize it someday.
Another way to look at it: CBS Corporation has a market cap of 22 Billion. CBS owns all sorts of businesses, I haven't done the math to estimate what % of the market cap would be attributable to the CBS broadcast network and the fully-owned affiliates, but I wouldn't
$65 mil * (43%/1%) = ??? (Score:2, Funny)
This is some sort of trick question, right?
It's all relative... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's only worth what it can make in a reasonable amount of time, and that time is growing short as video blogging [vobbo.com] competitors [castpost.com] build [fileratings.com] their [vimeo.com] userbases [ourmedia.com].
Eventually their huge market share will begin being split by competiing sites that slightly beat their technology, and then the value starts to fall...
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I'm not even sure if any technology investment is worthwhile given the vicious cycle of ups and downs. It looks to me to be a "hot potato" scheme,
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Now add to that the statistical analysis of the put market (high debt in a short period = forced sale of shares on
Wait for the revolution (Score:5, Insightful)
These amatuer home videos are just the beginning. Eventually all professionally done shows will be available. And maybe there will be an indy uprising of stuff that wouldn't get on TV, but will be seen on the net. Actually that's already happened, but I believe amatuer stuff will become more refined over time.
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Re:Wait for the revolution (Score:5, Interesting)
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But someone has to pay for the tubes!
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Oddly enough - this mentality did exist 800 years ago. Why do you think patents and copyrights were invented in the first place?
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If the mentality of 800 years ago existed today, everyone would have pirated multiple copies of every media in reach.
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Wow, and in a perfect world everything would be perfect. While your statement has the "all warm and nice inside" initial feel to it, it really makes absolutely no sense at all. What is it that occupies our libraries, mostly copyrighted "for profit" material. A great percentage of the material itself would not have b
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And the neat thing is, there's still plenty of potential in it, and progress continues at this rapid rate. Thinking about what the internet could have been is pretty useless, because there's sti
Re:Wait for the revolution (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you mean authors, artists, journalists, researchers, software developers etc ... I guess you could consider Joe Blow novelist a "baron" but it's a bit of a stretch.
A common dream amongst people who don't produce information for a living.
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No, I mean the vampiric corporate machine feeds on these people. When you hear that an artist or author gets 3%-10% of the sale price of an album or a book, I'm talking about the people that get the remaining money without having any talent themselves. Sure, it costs time and money to bring these things to market, but most of this is driven by greed.
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What is it that you are looking to know? Or are you talking about just newly created entertainment content? Because last time I checked there were definatelt a few places to go to find and get all that there is to know that you can learn about by reading, looking at pictures or seeing video. There are gaps in the knowledge that is available, but you are a member of the human race too and thanks to the Internet and places like wikipedia
The writing's on the wall.... again. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Companies relying to heavily on advertising caused the first dotcom bubble to burst. It seems no one learned their lesson.
Also, I don't even use YouTube or have it bookmarked.
sony bought grouper? noo! (Score:2)
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Important Factoid (Score:2)
In other words, Sony didn't buy Grouper for $65 million, Josh Feltzer sold Grouper for $65 million.
I don't know (Score:2, Funny)
Red flag (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes. In the late 1990s, the typical metrics for measuring a company did APPEAR to go out the window. In reality, those metrics were still as valid as ever.
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It's not a red flag, yet. Now is the perfect time to invest! When everyone else buys in, (and your money doubles, triples, ect,) you sell.
... After all, that's what most of the VCs who got rich off of the internet bubble did. They invested in any "internet" startup they could find, took it public, and sold all their stock before the company crashed.
Youtube may be worth the hardware they run on... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Youtube may be worth the hardware they run on.. (Score:5, Funny)
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You mean... (Score:1)
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-Eric
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Re:Youtube may be worth the hardware they run on.. (Score:2)
Anyway, about YouTube... how do they make their money anyway? Do they have
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Nope, just raw broadcast MPEG2 frames. IP is encapsulated in those frames in the case of cable internet. It is actually reversed. MPEG2 is uses for IP instead of IP being used for MPEG2. If that many any sense.
-matthew
Bubble Business Model? (Score:3, Insightful)
2. Get bought out. (Profit!)
3. there is no step 3
Step 2 might be expanded "get bought out by people with more money than understanding of internet fads". But really, after step 2 who cares about step 3? That's for the new owner to worry about.
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Uh waaahhh? (Score:5, Funny)
In other news, Entertainment analysts also predicted unanimously that tomorrow the sun will rise. Other predictions include that next week will have exactly 1 Monday and that Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa will not be candidates for the 2008 Presidential election.
More at 11.
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The word "monetize" gives me the willies... (Score:2, Informative)
1. Build a ____ sharing site.
2. ???
3. Profit!
Legality (Score:4, Interesting)
Their terms of use [youtube.com] say that users are responsible for any content posted. However, if I had a copyright on something posted I'd rather sue the company worth possibly billions than go through the hassle of hunting down a user.
I haven't really heard about too much of this, so they are probably doing a pretty good job of taking down offending clips, but when lawyers smell money in the water, look out.
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to hire someone to keep checking the site for your videos being uploaded?
This is for 0 additional income generated from protecting your copyright.
Or do you just go ahead and sue the company and see how the court rules.
The court will probably rule in the favor of the copyright holders now
that there is the Grokster decision.
Another approach for them would be to track down and sue the uploaders.
Perhaps youtube has a plan to work o
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Wait 2 years and we'll talk about youtube like we talk about Napster today. ie "remember when youtube was cool and you could find anything on it?"
Internet analysts always get it wrong. (Score:2)
Anyways this ISN'T like search engine technology.
It's WAY TOO EASY to copy what youtube is doing.
The competitors are already taking their share.
Re:Internet analysts always get it wrong. (Score:4, Interesting)
People said the same thing about Ebay.
The thing is, while it may be easy to copy the site, what's not so easy is getting people to care. The reason why sites like Ebay and YouTube stay popular over the long-term (and that is my prediction about YouTube - it's only going to get bigger) is that it is a self-sustaining marketplace. In Ebay's case, sellers go where the buyers are, and buyers go where the sellers are. In YouTube's case, same thing - video posters go where the viewers are, and the viewers go where those posting the most video are.
People spend hours just surfing around video there, searching for various things. You can find *anything* on YouTube - it's not just about home movies. I just found David Lynch's short-lived comedy series "On the Air" there a day ago, for example - this is a show I *never* thought I'd see again. I see stuff like this all the time there, and I rarely see similar things elsewhere. It's gotten to the point where if you want to find some piece of video, no matter how obscure, you just immediately go to YouTube because you know it's there. Why even bother with anywhere else?
Of course, YouTube has some potential pitfalls, but then so does all of its competitors. Most of what's on the site is infringing copyright. They have ridiculous bandwidth costs. And the quality is not very good. So it is possible they could fall, but if they do, it won't be because some competitor copied their site and did X thing a little bit better. They're going to have to implode of their own accord or through some legal matter in order to turn over the reigns.
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eBay succeeded once they built up a centralized community: people could build up a good rep, something useful when you actually intend to pay a total stranger. Sharing video clips is something that has no "stickiness" by comparison. I liken it to search engines: there's nothing stopping you from moving from Yahoo! to Google, or from Google to Qauzmn, or from Q
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Yeah. That's how Dogpile unseated Google as King Of Search Engines, after all.
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Currently, those ad companies are able to put their viral video ads up on YouTube for free.
What motivation do they have to pay money to YouTube for the same privilege? And if YouTube starts charging to let users put videos up, how do they distinguish between ad and non-ad content?
Revenue sucks, but assets are huge (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem: no revenue model for it yet. The great thing: easily understood and manipulated. Now there are many knock-offs, including PornoTube, and so on.
What's it worth? With little intellectual property, not much except in future revenue potential. Some aging media king, like Sony, ought to buy them and lose lots of money on them, like TW did with AOL.
Seriously folks, until a revenue model appears, it's just cool, not worth much
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Usually though the opposite happens. Companies don't lose money on these deal, they usually gain a lot. A company comes around and buys up ****.com, and as they run it into the ground they make a fortune. They don't usually spend millions (or as estimated with YouTube, billions) of dollars to lose it in a gamble. The first thing a buyer, like Sony, would do is use their existing might to trick out their
You Tube not worth much (Score:2)
However if the youtube and its imitators replacing the Akimbo service and the other video delivery services they might be in the money. But video content producers are so vary of delivering it via the internet, I won
1/800,000,000th less than they think... (Score:2)
Probably more, because I actually have money, pay for my own ISP connection, own a house, etc. On the other hand, I am not TOO young, so maybe I am not the "money" demographic. Heh, The way things are going in the US, the "money" demographic aren't going to have any -- it is all going to be sucked into retirement benefits for "us", soon (whether we ne
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I'm using Firefox/Adblock. So maybe that's it. As far as "subliminal advertising" on YouTube... I'm not saying it's not there. Just that I have never seen it myself. I think you're being a bit paranoid.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I MUST go buy 3 cases of that delicious Pepsi Cola.
Immediately.
I think you should ask like Emmalina like... (Score:3, Funny)
Yes that's enough from some silly teen bimbo shaking her backside on YouTube and thinking she's made a revolutionary discovery.
What's it worth? Very little. Probably a little for the interface, a little for the interface, and a little for the brand name recognition. What will greedy morons pay? Who knows! Stopped trying to predict that during the
YouTube is great because of a bit of Flash. (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO, it's soooo easy to watch the videos and share the videos. It used to be a royal pain to put video on your small or personal website. Real Audio? Windows Media? Quicktime? They were all problem prone. The odds of having those work for more than... oh, 70% of your viewers was slim at best. OS support, plugins working, and having the server side software -- it was all a mess. Never mind the bandwidth requirements. YouTube made it easy. Since more than 90% of people have Flash installed, and Flash video seems idiot proof (to watch), the whole video thing is now practical. Plus YouTube provides the bandwidth, and cut-and-paste HTML for sharing.
In hindsight, it's a simple concept, executed well, and with good timing. That said, I wouldn't spend a billion for it. I don't think people care where they host their videos as long as it's free, quick, and easy. I doubt that many people actually browse YouTube, so switching costs for video sharers and viewers is pretty much zero.
YouTube is worth ZERO dollars (Score:5, Interesting)
Any company with the cash to buy YouTube is going to decide in the long run it isn't worth it.
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Er... Rupert Murdoch? Any large media organisation who's business it is to buy and sell rights.
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Popular != Profitable
-Eric
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It's trivial to prove the existence of copyrighted content on YouTube.
It is not as trivial to prove that YouTube was aware that sharing a particular piece of content was a violation of copyright, or even if it was that YouTube is liable for damages.
I Haven't Seen This Few Posts ... (Score:2)
billion atleast (Score:1)
Worth? (Score:2)
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"By agreeing to pay $65 million for Grouper--a profitless video-sharing company with negligible market share--Sony..."
If by profitless, they mean loss-making, then yes, they would spend millions on a site that's losing money...
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