It appears that YouTube can only monetize about 4 percent of its content. Which leads to the question of “how can Youtube monetize the other 96 percent of its content?” The answer, believe it or not lives within Youtube and begins with another question: “Can YouTube generate enough traffic per video to cover the cost of reviewing content for copyright violations?” After all, Google is the king of traffic generation and monetization, right?
When it comes to broadband Internet access, you can have speed or large volumes of data transfer. You can’t have both. One certainty in the broadband world is that for those of us with cable or DSL modems connecting us to the Internet, there is still a finite amount of bandwidth available. When a user consumes a disproportionate and significant amount of bandwidth, it can and will slow down everyone. I hate that.
Bear with me for a minute, because I’m about to tell a long and self-involved tale. Ultimately I think it might say something interesting about platforms for television consumption, but of course that’ll be up to you to decide.
Before last fall, I barely had a television in my house and had only ever really watched TV shows over the last five years on DVD or iTunes.
Is there anything more fun than sitting around, growing your hair, drinking a Bud while listening to Jethro Tull and pondering how to change the balance of power in the search world and unseat Google? Better search? Too subjective. Better monetization? After the fact. Better User Interface? Will we know it when we see it? A new and different search? Semantic? Human powered? We won’t know till we know. But what about the Google Index — all the Web sites that are indexed by Google? What is it worth to be in the Google Index?
Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research wrote an amazing report entitled “And Now for the News…The Emperor Has No Clothes.” If you can get a copy, read it. Starting with the disappointing but expected news that journalism is no longer a service consumers desire to pay for, he moves on to the problems facing Internet video.
There is a dirty little secret in the cable industry. It’s being kept secret not by the cable distributors, but by the big cable networks. End this practice and the United States goes from being third world by international broadband standards to top of the charts and exemplary. Make this change and Net neutrality becomes a non-issue. There is plenty of bandwidth for everyone. What is the dirty little secret ?
Is blogging just the end result of someone’s input into a content management system? Of course it is. So what? You could point a URL to a daily post in a discussion forum. It would have far better interactivity than a blog, and would be just as easy to post as often as the author would like. Does that make the output purely a forum post?
There was a lot of discussion about my previous posts. My point is that the Internet is a stable platform. It’s a utility. It’s evolved to the point where you can count on it and develop applications for it without much fear that it’s going to change.
What confirms my point is that with all the talk of a possible or existing recession, not a single mention is ever made about how increases in productivity from technology will pull us through. That is counter to the recessions of the past 25 years. Whether it was the early ’80s, the ’90s or even the post-bubble, economists and others pointed to technology as a catalyst to productivity that would help pull us out of our economic doldrums.
One thing about Jerry Yang that I always have admired is that he cares. He cares about his employees. He cares about his products. He cares about his shareholders. Most of all he cares about building a world-class company that can be great at what it does.
If you look at Yahoo singularly, it is a great company. For he and David Filo to build a company with more than 6B in sales and more than 25B in market cap is an astounding feat. Unfortunately for Yahoo, it has had to weather both the Internet bubble bursting and the emergence of Google as a force in search and online advertising.
There once was a time when the release date of an album was exciting. For our favorite artists, we knew when the last album came out and when the next album was due. If you loved the artist, you bought it. If you didn’t, you either bought the single or you listened to the album with your friends and then decided.
As the price of records and then CDs increased year by year, spending 20 bucks for a CD became a purchase you needed to be sure of rather than a no-brainer or impulse buy.
I had heard there was a 5k friend limit on Facebook. I just didn’t take it to heart. Until I reached 5k and tried to add 5001, at which point FB reminded of the limit. It was a weird moment, but actually one that I have come to respect and appreciate. Facebook went from being a way to broadcast information to 5k people–probably 4k of which I didn’t know or even have a business link to–to a platform I either had to take seriously or walk away from.
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