My colleague Michael Dales has found the very first iPod ad. Quaint.
This sent me looking for the famous 1984 Macintosh commercial — and Lo! — here it is:
Sometimes, YouTube is just wonderful.
Category Archives: YouTube
TechBubble 2.0
This morning’s Observer column…
Colossally inflated valuations are an infallible indicator of a bubble. In the late 1990s, dotcom start-ups with 50 employees and zero profits were briefly valued at more than the market cap of Fortune 500 companies. In 2005, Rupert Murdoch paid $649m for MySpace and eBay paid $2.6bn for Skype, a VoIP [internet telephony] company. Last year, Google forked out $1.65bn for YouTube. Such valuations provide terrific incentives for ambitious geeks because the new web services require less upfront investment than the original dotcoms. What is YouTube, after all, other than some smart software for converting every uploaded video clip into a Flash movie, plus server capacity and bandwidth? Skype adds 150,000 subscribers a day and buys almost no hardware because it uses its subscribers’ computers to do the heavy lifting…
Loadsamoney 2.0
From ye olde New York Times
Everyone suspected that the investors, founders and early employees of YouTube made tidy sums when it was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in stock late last year.
But until yesterday, few knew just how tidy those sums were. The answer, which Google delivered in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is now in: The sums are big enough to spark a new wave of envy across Silicon Valley.
The biggest windfalls went, not surprisingly, to the company’s three founders and to Sequoia Capital, the main financial backer of YouTube, the popular video-sharing site.
A founder and YouTube’s chief executive Chad Hurley received 694,087 shares of Google and an additional 41,232 in a trust. Based on Google’s closing price yesterday of $470.01, the shares are worth more than $345 million.
Another founder, Steven Chen, received 625,366 shares and an additional 68,721 in a trust, for more than $326 million.
Sequoia Capital XI, the Sequoia fund that invested close to $11.5 million in YouTube from November 2005 to April 2006, was listed as having 941,027 shares, which are valued at more than $442 million.
The filing lists a Sequoia Capital XI Principals Fund owning 102,376 shares, valued at more than $48 million, and Sequoia Technology Partners XI with 29,724 shares, valued at nearly $14 million.
Sequoia, considered one of the most successful venture capital firms in the country, was also a principal investor in Google.
The third founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, who left the company early on to pursue a graduate degree in computer science, received 137,443 shares worth more than $64 million.
In addition, several funds affiliated with Artis Capital Management, a San Francisco hedge fund managed by Stuart L. Peterson that was a co-investor with Sequoia, were listed as having received 176,621 shares, valued at $83 million.
When the deal was announced in October, YouTube was less than two years old and had about 70 employees. Several of the early employees are listed in the filing statement as owning thousands of Google shares.
Missing the point
Tech Review has published an Associated Press piece about the release of embarrassing videos on the Net…
NEW YORK (AP) — For evidence that digital information, once set free, cannot be controlled, consider the steamy video of Brazilian supermodel Daniela Cicarelli making out with her boyfriend on a Spanish beach and in the water just off shore.
The couple persuaded a Brazilian court last fall to force the video-sharing site YouTube to remove copies, but other users simply resubmitted the video through their free accounts.
Earlier this month, Internet service providers in Brazil, responding to the judge’s order, briefly blocked access to YouTube entirely. But by then other Web sites already had the video, and many in Brazil even had stored personal copies on their computer hard drives….
Actually, the story seems to me to be much more interesting than that. What happened was that Brazilian internet users were so enraged by losing access to YouTube as a result of the model’s legal actions that she eventually twigged that alienating an entire country is not exactly a good career move. And as for the proposition that her ‘right’ to privacy should be respected when she had openly coupled with her boyfriend on a public beach and in the water — in full view of dozens of people, well, words fail one (as the Queen might say).
Different considerations apply to the case of Keeley Hazell, a British model and former Page Three girl, who made a private video of herself having enthusiastic sex with an ex-boyfriend only to find it released onto the Web a couple of weeks ago. (It’s not clear who released it.) YouTube has taken down the copy that was originally available on its site, but a simple Google search suggests that it’s still pretty widely available. So there’s a case for saying that her privacy has been breached, but there seems to be little she can do about it because by now the video is all over the Web.
MySpace and the sharecropping economy
Interesting post by Nick Carr about the economic implications of user-generated content.
What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.
It strikes me that this dynamic, which I don’t think we’ve ever seen before, at least not on this scale, is the most interesting, and unsettling, economic phenomenon the Internet has produced.
Carr has written about this before. For example:
Web 2.0, by putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very few.
Ed Felten disagrees with this analysis:
It’s a mistake, too, to think that MySpace provides nothing of real value to its users. I think of MySpace as a low-end Web hosting service. Most sites, including this blog, pay a hosting company to manage servers, store content, serve out pages, and so on. If all you want is to put up a few pages, full-on hosting service is overkill. What you want instead is a simple system optimized for ease of use, and that’s basically what MySpace provides. Because it provides less than a real hosting service, MySpace can offer a more attractive price point — zero — which has the additional advantage of lowering transaction costs.
The most interesting assumption Carr makes is that MySpace is capturing most of the value created by its users’ contributions. Isn’t it possible that MySpace’s profit is small, compared to the value that its users get from using the site?
Underlying all of this, perhaps, is a common but irrational discomfort with transactions where no cash changes hands. It’s the same discomfort we see in some weak critiques of open-source, which look at a free-market transaction involving copyright licenses and somehow see a telltale tinge of socialism, just because no cash changes hands in the transaction. MySpace makes a deal with its users. Based on the users’ behavior, they seem to like the deal.
Video satire
I’ve been looking at some of the hilarious video satires that increasingly pop up on YouTube and Google Video. here, for example, is a Bush ‘State of the Union’ Address ingeniously doctored. And here is a German video showing that Dubya is in fact a remotely-controlled robot.
On the other hand, here is Dubya doing an hilarious double act with comedian Steve Bridges at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Dvorak on YouTube
Very perceptive column by John Dvorak about YouTube. He gets it exactly right, IMHO. Sample:
BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) — YouTube, the privately-held video sharing website, now delivers an estimated 100 million videos a day to its users. The site has been online for barely a year.
It’s [sic] growth rate is phenomenal and without precedent, skyrocketing into the public consciousness and becoming commonplace nearly overnight. So what do the journalists, analysts and pundits all do when they witness this moment in history? Kvetch.
Nobody actually wants to understand exactly why this happened in the first place. Instead you hear the following (and typical) Silicon Valley commentary. “How are they going to monetize it?” “It’s the dotcom bust 2.0!” “There must be a video bubble.” “They’re burning through $1.5 million a month. How can they continue?”
It’s weird but almost nobody looks at this tremendous growth curve and asks themselves, “Holy cripes! How did that happen!?!” Instead you get headlines such as “Is YouTube the next Napster?”
Apparently YouTube has stumbled on to something and perhaps we should try and understand that in itself. If and when the company manages to “monetize” (don’t you love that term?) things may change.
And you must assume that with all the marketing brains out there one of them can find a way to make money. I’m more concerned about why this product exploded the way it did. I’ll critique the money-making scheme when it appears.
So let’s look at what caused the growth. And let’s note that this company is hardly the first on the block to let users share video. Google video, in fact, looks a lot like YouTube, but never achieved this growth despite getting a big head start.
Two things seem to be at work. The first is the incredible desire people have to share video clips with each other. That’s now apparent.
What’s not so apparent, unless you actually have tried to use the various video sharing sites, is that nobody — and I mean nobody — made it easy until YouTube.
Right on! (Now there’s an ageing hippy exclamatiion if ever I saw one!) I pay — happily — for my Flickr Pro account. And, like John D, I would pay for YouTube too.
YouTube is like Flickr in the early days — you can see its members still struggling with the technology. But they’re rapidly getting on top of it. Editing movies is HARD. (Believe me, I know: I have the scars to prove it.) In a year’s time there will be even more accomplished videos like this.
YouTube stats
From Technology Review…
YouTube is the one of the most popular video-sharing sites where amateurs and professionals alike can share and view videos — of a recent trip, of a new dog or even of themselves burping.
According to comScore Media Metrix, YouTube had 16 million unique U.S. visitors in July, a 20 percent increase from 13 million in June. The site did not even have measurable traffic until August 2005, when it had 58,000 unique visitors.
For July, YouTube debuted in the Top 50 at No. 40, up from 58th in June.ComScore also recorded a doubling of traffic to News Corp.-owned MySpace.com’s video site, with 20 million visitors, trailing only Yahoo Inc.’s video site, which had 21 million.
“Consumers clearly view video as one of the most accessible, interesting and entertaining sources of content on the Web,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix. ”The trends we’re witnessing indicate that online video is emerging from its infancy and entering the mainstream.”