YouTube.Google.com
It’s hard not to write about this deal. There are so many different ways to look at the merger that it seems almost impossible to avoid a post. Google, the search engine giant, has made what will likely amount to one of the most controversial acquisitions of this new Internet era - just ask Mark Cuban. In YouTube, Google has acquired the greatest source of online video clips. A site that has 65,000 new clips uploaded a day and over 100 million video clips viewed a day. The downside is the cost of the bandwidth that all these videos require, an amount estimated to be $1million in April of this year.
One of the first questions is how this will work with regards to Google Video? Would it not make sense for the company to start copying the database of YouTube video clips into Google Video? And how about making Google the search engine of choice on YouTube? These are both quite obvious steps to take as the company moves forward and looks to monetize the investment. With control over the Internet’s largest and most used collection of media, the company has several different avenues for generating revenue. Sponsored search results, commercials/ads before clips or every few clips, and the potential to create more of a market for the independent producers. But there are definite concerns about making money on the site, too.
People who are uploading their content onto the site aren’t necessarily going to continue to do so the site can make money. Will there be some sort of profit sharing for those who are providing the best or most viewed or most marketable content? It’s been shown before how even the simplest of changes to a popular site can create a great deal of backlash by the users, and since these sites are typically dime-a-dozen, risking rocking the boat too much could have irreversible affects. Facebook faced huge backlash when minor changes were made to the inner-workings of the site, and quickly had to recover. How much would it take for users to stumble upon the next big thing for sharing media? And this doesn’t even begin to look at the copyright concerns that are growing regarding the content contained on the site.
It would seem that Google has admitted defeat on their project and taken an if you can’t beat ‘em, join em stance. Rather than tackle the task of competing in the fairly clogged market, Google purchased the big daddy of them all. That gives Google control of their own content, completely free, or with some sort of revenue sharing model. Based on that alone, the deal might make sense for Google. Online media is well on its way to becoming the next big thing. Probably the biggest since cellular devices, DVD players, or the Internet itself, depending on how you rank the impact of each. The entire movie and television industry will basically be moved online, and until this point, Google had no content of their own. Now they have 65,000 free videos being produced daily.