YouTube: Stop Growing & Start Charging Money!
Engadget columnist Stephen Speicher writes about YouTube’s long-term success:
But where is YouTube’s legitimization? More specifically, where is the path to profitability? Millions of streams per day is quite impressive, but it’s also quite expensive. Estimates for YouTube’s traffic have been pegged as high as 200TB per day. No, that ‘T’ was not a typo; that’s Terabytes. Bandwidth costs alone most likely approach one million dollars a month. Add on top of that the cost of running a service as massive as YouTube’s, and you quickly come to the same conclusion: It’s time for YouTube to stop growing and start making money.
Stop growing? Yes, stop growing. YouTube’s success might just be killing them. They’ve already gained the elusive “mindshare.” People are familiar with YouTube. People know YouTube. Any further growth is just an ego-quest; it’s not a quest for money and it’s certainly not a quest for a sustainable business. Furthermore, added growth might just hinder long-term aspirations. With the majority of their traffic falling into one of two camps: a) illegal traffic (e.g. the much-talked-about “Lazy Sunday” clip) or b) traffic which will never make them a cent, it’s time for YouTube to take a step back and ask the question “How do we attract more quality and less quantity?” The answer (as always) is money.
There’s an old eBay story (whether or not it’s apocryphal I can’t say) that goes something like the following: it was when eBay started charging for its auctions that the site became useful. Until that point in eBay’s existence, “good” auctions were often hard to find amidst the sea of “bad” auctions. By adding a little money into the mix, serious buyers were able to find serious sellers and vice versa. While not exactly the same thing, it is time for YouTube to start courting quality content producers.
I completely agree with Speicher, and am willing to pay (oh, say) $25/year for access to YouTube services. To some of you, $25 may seem like $25 too much, especially since YouTube has always been free. But paying a couple of bucks a month to ensure YouTube stays around sure beats having YouTube disappear under its own crushing weight.
Additionally, I wouldn’t be surprised to see YouTube offset the costs of hosting by splicing 15-30 second ads at the beginning of hosted videos, viewable by non-paying members. Paying members wouldn’t have to view the ads, giving YouTube users a real incentive to upgrade from a free to a pro account.
Bottom line: YouTube has proven there’s a huge market for its services, and now they just need to put lazer-like focus efforts on monetizing. If they don’t start making money soon, they’ll stay on their crash course to rapid-growth startup failure. Kozmo.com, anyone?
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Damn. YouTube tanking: scary concept.
We, the folks who live with/for these services, and the things we can do with them, should begin thinking hard on what we can do without YouTube.
Personally, I only get video content from the blogosphere from YouTube. I saw a couple of 1980s Buzzcocks videos, which was great, but it constituted 20 minutes of YouTube usage. And the 80s new wave crowd is hardly YouTube’s target user group.
But geeks who need infrastructure are.
I need to think, and see how the Democracy Player and its Torrents fit into this YouTube-less future.
YouTube’s successful shape - a start-up company - might also be its downfall for people who need their videos out - say, folks involved with uncomfortable political activism. They need to be sure their videos can stay up and about, without any board of directors bowing to political pressure from without. De-centralization might serve those folks best.
You tube should not be subscriber driven. A lot of the content on you tube is terrible and I believe a waste of download time. If it was more efficient and dumped unwatched videos it would be a better product.
@cjbaranby
I completely disagree. If YouTube were subscriber-driven (that is to say, customers had to pay to upload and store videos), I suspect the quality of videos would improve overall. The fee, even if nominal, would weed out anyone but the most serious of video-sharers.
This has happened before for many websites. Ebay, for example, was legitimized only after it started charging people to place listings. Prior to that, it attracted less serious sellers.
Metafilter.com is another example. They limit membership, and charge a yearly fee. Only those serious enough to pony up the $25/year are allowed to participate, and you get better discussions as a result.
One thing YouTube could do a better job at is filtering out the garbage. It seems like the Popular page always has college kid sing-alongs or some other junk that shouldn’t be as popular as they are. (Perhaps I’m just out of touch with the youth of today).
I’d like to see YouTube allow users to set preferences to only see certain types of videos or only see videos from certain users. That way, the people who want to see backyard wrestling will get what they want, and you and I can see something a little more interesting…