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brepublican

macrumors 6502a
Jul 22, 2005
812
0
NY
darwen said:
This is stupid. Plain stupid.
And now, the wait begins.

To quote Mark Cuban: "Anyone who buys YouTube is a moron"
:eek:

Lets wait for those lawsuits to start kicking in...
 

zwida

macrumors 6502a
Jan 5, 2001
595
23
NYC + Madison, WI
Cinch said:
There is a lot of speculation going around, and it smells awfully familiar like that of 1999 and 2000.

True, there IS a lot of speculation going around, but to me it smells a lot more like 1997 or 1998. That doesn't mean that ANY of this is justified, it just suggests that it might go on for awhile.
 

shen

macrumors 6502
Jun 19, 2003
390
0
brepublican said:
And now, the wait begins.

To quote Mark Cuban: "Anyone who buys YouTube is a moron"

to quote my grandmother, "he would know a moron on sight, as he sees one in the mirror every morning".......
 

edcrosay

macrumors member
Oct 27, 2005
81
0
Cybix said:
does anyone know anything about youtube's history? How they started, who started it, where it was started, anything?

I like reading about businesses/companies that started up a little website then sold their company for over a billion dollars not long after.

how old is youtube?

hrmmmm.
Check out their wikipedia entry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube
 

coryp420

macrumors newbie
Jun 12, 2006
6
1
Tampa Bay, Florida
darwen said:
This is stupid. Plain stupid. YouTube has no potential to make any sort of money under their current business strategy. This is a dumb move on Google's part. YouTube uses more bandwidth on a day to day basis than any other site on the internet. Google is going to need to pay to keep that bandwidth up on a site making less money than it is spending.

This is absurd! What the hell is Google trying to do? Their business strategy seems to be "lets screw up as much as possible".

This is a great business move for Google. Look at it this way, Google paid $900 Million for advertising rights on MySpace, thats more than News Corp paid ($570 Million) for the whole site. So now Google owns YouTube for less than double that price and has EXCLUSIVE ad rights for a site with millions of visitors a day.

Google primary business model is selling ads, so even if the YouTube division just barely breaks even, their ad revenue is gonna skyrocket.
 
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HiRez

macrumors 603
Jan 6, 2004
6,250
2,576
Western US
I like YouTube, but what I hate about it is they compress the hell out of the video and it looks terrible.
 

ender78

macrumors 6502a
Jan 9, 2005
578
342
iMikeT said:
YouTube + Google Video + Front Row/iTV = :D (Me)

I could care less about YouTube, video quality has far to go before I think that it is watchable on a computer screen let alone a big screen TV. Compression is so bad that its hard to tell anything apart.

If you take away copyrighted content, you're left with 1 million coppies of some dude lip syncing Britney Spears. No one has sued YouTube as of yet because they have no money [they have yet to turn a profit]. Lets see what happens when copyright holders decide to go after Google's piggy bank.

All friends of mine that use YouTube, watch nothing other than copyrighted content, where will they go when that goes away. If Google thinks that YouTube is a good content distribution network, they're kidding themselves.
 

etoiles

macrumors 6502a
Jun 12, 2002
834
44
Where the air is crisp
coryp420 said:
This is a great business move for Google. Look at it this way, Google paid $900 Million for advertising rights on MySpace, thats more than News Corp paid ($570 Million) for the whole site. So now Google owns YouTube for less than double that price and has EXCLUSIVE ad rights for a site with millions of visitors a day.

Google primary business model is selling ads, so even if the YouTube division just barely breaks even, their ad revenue is gonna skyrocket.

Bingo.
Also remember, Google paid 1.6 billion in stock, not cash. If 'the bubble bursts', they don't risk much. It is just paper.
 

lazyrighteye

Contributor
Jan 16, 2002
4,091
6,304
Denver, CO
myspace

Cinch said:
myspace or youtube?

Cinch

Even with Rupert Murdoch's recent acquisition of (read: pumping a ****-ton of money into) myspace, I STILL think YouTube has more of a shelf-life than myspace.
people will also eventually tire of counting their "friends" and reading what maddog3215 had for breakfast. And more importantly, people will always want to WATCH the adventures of some random moron much more so than read about them. Sorry, but we're living in an increasingly functionally illiterate society.

And yes, YouTube vid quality is poor. Burt we all know it is only a matter of time before all online A/V quality is pristine. Yet no matter the advances in the interweb, DIY myspace pages will always look like train wrecks. Point? I see more potential for improvement, growth and diversity with YouTube than myspace.

A day hardly passes that I don't watch something on YouTube. And I think I have been to myspace, like, three times.
But that's just me.

*********

Oops - inadvertently submitted the wrong subject header. Went to Edit. Can't change. Meh...
 

morespce54

macrumors 65816
Apr 30, 2004
1,331
11
Around the World
darwen said:
This is stupid. Plain stupid. YouTube has no potential to make any sort of money under their current business strategy. This is a dumb move on Google's part.

I don't know... Yahoo bought Flickr even if they already had a Website for photos. They could have "enhanced" their own Website but instead, the bought up a name. In that case, I don't think they made a bad choice...
 

Cinch

macrumors 6502
Sep 18, 2005
479
2
lazyrighteye said:
A day hardly passes that I don't watch something on YouTube. And I think I have been to myspace, like, three times.
But that's just me.

YouTube has been around less than a year while myspace at least 2 (correct me if I'm wrong here). I don't know, maybe I'm just growing old, but watching a guy putting on 100+ T-shirts is not exactly compelling TV or video. Maybe I'm completely wrong and YouTube does stick around. I like the idea of sending home video (wedding/birthday) to relatives privately of course and maybe YouTube can deliver on this but so can other companies/app e.g. .Mac or future Google app.

Cinch
 

IJ Reilly

macrumors P6
Jul 16, 2002
17,909
1,496
Palookaville
gugy said:
Man, Google is not stupid to pay that amount of money just for name recognition.

That's exactly what they did. They bought the brand for $1.65 billion.

I can hardly believe that the markets are bidding Google up after this fiasco. I think a lot of people who don't really understand technology are currently assuming that the people running Google are geniuses. But it doesn't take much awareness to notice Google's deficiencies. They've got one core competency, but they've insisted in expanding here, there and everywhere with no apparent plan and often with less than stunning results. Haven't we seen it all before?
 

lmalave

macrumors 68000
Nov 8, 2002
1,614
0
Chinatown NYC
coryp420 said:
This is a great business move for Google. Look at it this way, Google paid $900 Million for advertising rights on MySpace, thats more than News Corp paid ($570 Million) for the whole site. So now Google owns YouTube for less than double that price and has EXCLUSIVE ad rights for a site with millions of visitors a day.

What you are saying makes no sense. Google's YouTube division should *still* be selling advertising to the *highest* bidder, not giving "exclusives" to itself!! Even if Google is saving money by advertising on one of its own sites, that could've be offset by selling the adverstising to someone else for an even higher price! This is a common misconceptions about mergers and "synergy". Giving other divisions in your company price breaks or freebies is *not* efficient, for the same reason that monopolies aren't efficient! The best approach is to sell product (in this case advertising space) at market prices.

True "synergy", or value created by a merger, has nothing to do with freebies or price breaks. It has to come from a shared resource that can be leveraged across companies, for example: management expertise, brand, operations processes, information technology systems, etc.

coryp420 said:
Google primary business model is selling ads, so even if the YouTube division just barely breaks even, their ad revenue is gonna skyrocket.

Google arleady earns a very disproportionate share of the entire Web's ad revenues. I don't think their objective is just to increase eyeballs and revenue: they expect YouTube to add to their profits, not just to revenue.
 

lmalave

macrumors 68000
Nov 8, 2002
1,614
0
Chinatown NYC
IJ Reilly said:
That's exactly what they did. They bought the brand for $1.65 billion.

I can hardly believe that the markets are bidding Google up after this fiasco. I think a lot of people who don't really understand technology are currently assuming that the people running Google are geniuses. But it doesn't take much awareness to notice Google's deficiencies. They've got one core competency, but they've insisted in expanding here, there and everywhere with no apparent plan and often with less than stunning results. Haven't we seen it all before?

That's not true. They bid not just for the brand, but also for eyeballs and future eyeballs. Google's core competency is ad placement, specifically knowing how to extract maximum revenue from every ad placement. This is a core competency that can be leveraged to *any* site that has a large enough user base (large enough to get the volume and granularity of data that allows Google's algorithms to be so successful).

So frankly, I think any very large and diverse site (such as a social networking or file/video sharing site) whose revenues come primarily from advertising are an *excellent* acquisition target. The reasoning is simple: Google thinks that it can squeeze a *lot* more profits from YouTube than YouTube was earning on its own. This is in fact the best and possibly the *only* rationale for a merger. It's analogous to when a poorly-run company gets acquired by a much more efficient company: the rationale is that the parent company can manage the company better and make it profitable.
 

bubblesw2

macrumors newbie
Sep 16, 2006
4
0
Brookline, MA
joemama said:
And it's all Flash, so you can't put it on your iPod or even download it.

Well then it's too bad a company who has close ties to Apple bought YouTube. I can't see them ever wanting to make it so that YouTube movies will eventually be playable on iPods. That would just make too much sense and be pure lunacy on Google's part!:p
 

BoyBach

macrumors 68040
Feb 24, 2006
3,031
13
Surely Google's billions of dollars in its bank account will be a green light for all of the copyright lawyers out there who were hoping Youtube would become rich enough to sue?
 

rockthecasbah

macrumors 68020
Apr 12, 2005
2,395
2
Moorestown, NJ
I'm interested to see how this plays out for Google. I really could care less about watching Google Video / YouTube on an iTV since i won't have one :)D) but i truly would like to see if Google can pull this off and turn YouTube from a money pit to a profitable venture. It will either be a fiasco or a huge success in my opinion, doesn't seem like something that could just break even....;)
 

IJ Reilly

macrumors P6
Jul 16, 2002
17,909
1,496
Palookaville
lmalave said:
That's not true. They bid not just for the brand, but also for eyeballs and future eyeballs.

This is a different way of saying the exact same thing.

I'd argue that Google's core competency is placing ads on their search engine, and that's all. If the search engine wasn't good, the ads would be worth far less. It should be understood that the content owners had already claimed all of the revenues associated with posting copyrighted materials on YouTube, so this looks like a zero ad revenue dollar proposition for Google unless they can talk the copyright owners into a very different deal.

Google really needs to perfect the services they've already got before branching out into other things, or they will risk diluting their brand to the point of drowning it. Google Maps, for example, still feels unfinished. They need to make their services shine before moving on. They're beginning to look like a company with a severe case of ADD.
 

Doctor Q

Administrator
Staff member
Sep 19, 2002
39,777
7,498
Los Angeles
The YouTube crew has moved to a larger office. They were all crammed into a tiny one before (like all good Internet startups), but now they can afford a few more cubicles.

Google says that the YouTube owners will continue to lead the operation, so Google wasn't merely buying rights to the name or taking over the founders' jobs.
 

Warbrain

macrumors 603
Jun 28, 2004
5,702
293
Chicago, IL
Doctor Q said:
The YouTube crew has moved to a larger office. They were all crammed into a tiny one before (like all good Internet startups), but now they can afford a few more cubicles.

Google says that the YouTube owners will continue to lead the operation, so Google wasn't merely buying rights to the name or taking over the founders' jobs.

They had already bought the new office, but they didn't know if they were going to be able to move in or if Google was going to make them move.
 

IJ Reilly

macrumors P6
Jul 16, 2002
17,909
1,496
Palookaville
Doctor Q said:
Google says that the YouTube owners will continue to lead the operation, so Google wasn't merely buying rights to the name or taking over the founders' jobs.

I don't think anyone said they were. Not I, anyway. The point I'm making is that Google bought YouTube in large part because they get not only a current audience, but the dominant "brand" in video sharing. Name recognition is important, even on the Internet. Once a name become widely recognized and entrenched, that brand become difficult to beat.
 

Doctor Q

Administrator
Staff member
Sep 19, 2002
39,777
7,498
Los Angeles
IJ Reilly said:
Once a name become widely recognized and entrenched, that brand become difficult to beat.
Which is exactly why a company might be purchased solely for its name and customer list, even if the service will be replaced by something different or run by different people. The rights to the "Napster" name were valuable for that reason.
 

dejo

Moderator emeritus
Sep 2, 2004
15,982
452
The Centennial State
njmac said:
Also, people on here have commented how lame the homemade videos on YouTube are, but I love YouTube. If I want to see a clip of the daily show - YouTube.
Pretty soon the copyright owners of that will put the kybosh on anyone else uploading those clips and you will be SOL.
 
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