Discussion
To justify that price it ought to be earning something like £100m a year ... that's the better part of 300 grand a day. That is an awful lot of advertising ... and I can't get my head round why this is supposed to be premim advertising space. Yes, it gets a lot of hits, but who wants their advertising to appear next to a homemade documentary of a kid farting, or some happy slapping?
ATG said:
To justify that price it ought to be earning something like £100m a year ... that's the better part of 300 grand a day. That is an awful lot of advertising ... and I can't get my head round why this is supposed to be premim advertising space. Yes, it gets a lot of hits, but who wants their advertising to appear next to a homemade documentary of a kid farting, or some happy slapping?
As far as I am aware it works off google words....therefore people are able to comment on the videos they have watched below each individual video.
What google words does is pick out certain written words in the comments and taylors the displayed advertising links to relate to the affore mentioned comments. Each time your www.YOURWEBADDRESS.com appears in the google word box you pay 3p (for example)
Obviously with the level of traffic that site recieves there is alot of very clever taylored marketing going on!
Worth a shed load of cash - of in youtubes case 900 million (which is a big shed)
Edited by hoddo on Wednesday 11th October 08:34
ATG said:
Yes but it's 3p too much if your advert appears next to a picture of a kid's arse.
Touche !
Well unless you are selling toy arses its unlikely that your advert will be there.
I think the idea is if you have perhaps a video of a child running into a TV (you've been framed style) and then a youtube visitor comments 'WOW, look at the size of that TV' OR 'that is one nice TV' then www.sonyTV.com may pop up.
If its a video of 2 idiots fighting then maybe www.boxing.com may pop up.
Its designed so that if there is a video of a kids arse then something like www.tiffanydiamonds.com will not pop up
I recon most of these sites are covered now. Napster was shot down as it provided a platform to share this information.
Youtube is only providing a service to host PERSONAL videos and the individual loading copywrited material onto their site will be the one who is in the wrong.
Anyway the 3 lads who made 300 million each in 20 months have done the deal now, they can pack up, head of and live where the hell they like now
Youtube is only providing a service to host PERSONAL videos and the individual loading copywrited material onto their site will be the one who is in the wrong.
Anyway the 3 lads who made 300 million each in 20 months have done the deal now, they can pack up, head of and live where the hell they like now
The main thing which dictates company valuations is the market. From an accounting perspective the company may only be worth a fraction of what was paid, however if there was a bidding situation going on behind the scenes between the major search engines then that'll explain the price. Also, I don't know how the deal's been structured. It could be that much of the consideration is payable dependent on future performance, once the economies of scale have been leveraged. Regarding the copyright issue, this is a conundrum. I would imagine the previous owners would warrant historic (alleged) breaches and that the new owners took legal advice on it and have the appropriate indemnity insurance cover.
Thetwo original owners are probably in the clear and no doubt Google's legal teams will have looked at copyright issues and decided to go ahead.
Providing an outlet for displaying copyrighted material without receiving permission or paying royalties to the licence holders is still a very risky avenue to go down.
TV companies on the whole are rather ambiguous to Youtube. They don't like their material being featured without permission but don't mind the free publicity they receive when excerpts from their shows are hosted on the site. I think they will only get seriously worried if entire episodes or full programmes end up being posted up. At the moment, the people who should be most worried are those who produce specialist DVDs. I saw a whole 15 minute extract from one of the recent editions of "Motor Films Quarterly" posted on YouTube a few weeks ago. I am sure the two individuals who produce these DVDs (I know one of them) will be watching what YouTube do most carefully.
Now that they are a full-blown commercial operation, expect litigation some day soon.
Providing an outlet for displaying copyrighted material without receiving permission or paying royalties to the licence holders is still a very risky avenue to go down.
TV companies on the whole are rather ambiguous to Youtube. They don't like their material being featured without permission but don't mind the free publicity they receive when excerpts from their shows are hosted on the site. I think they will only get seriously worried if entire episodes or full programmes end up being posted up. At the moment, the people who should be most worried are those who produce specialist DVDs. I saw a whole 15 minute extract from one of the recent editions of "Motor Films Quarterly" posted on YouTube a few weeks ago. I am sure the two individuals who produce these DVDs (I know one of them) will be watching what YouTube do most carefully.
Now that they are a full-blown commercial operation, expect litigation some day soon.
rob05 said:
Anyone wishing they had thought up the idea?
£886 Millon for 18 months work not bad,I'm up for the next big thing if anyone wishes to share
£886 Millon for 18 months work not bad,I'm up for the next big thing if anyone wishes to share
Yep. Are they actually profitable at the moment? The hosting must cost a small fortune! It was set up by two friends. Its ideas like this that make me kick myself that I didn't think of them first especially the guy who sold a million pixels. There's time I suppose...
Even if you could justify the valuation based on the projected advertising revenue, surely you have to look at the replacement cost too? I can't see how anyone one could conceivably argue that it would cost £1bn to set up a business in competition with You Tube. How could it possibly cost that much to replace a company that is 18 months old and was itself started up with sod all capital? The only thing left which distinguishes You Tube from someone else trying to do the same thing is the You Tube brand. I'd exepct the user base to be pretty fickle, afterall the competiton is just a click away. Offer them something similiar but 10% better and they'll be off. So how is the brand worth nearly a billion pounds?
Let's not forget that Google have their own video service. Buying You Tube gives them access to their technology and ownership of thier competitor in this marketplace. It's clever technology and I need to invent something similar. My own efforts so far ( http://battles.interstellar-war.com ) are currently COSTING me money, not making it 
Edited by Witchfinder on Wednesday 11th October 09:58
minimax said:
dick dastardly said:
My problem with this is the amount of material on YouTube which they don't have the copyright to. Almost any music video can be found on there and loads of TV shows too. It won't be long until this starts to catch up on them.
i'd better get downloading then!
Youtube made a very clear statement in August that they intended to have every music video available free of charge and would be working with the record labels.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainm
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