Seeing that YouTube’s core users are upset at Google made me wonder: is Google onto something?
I think we give Google way too much credit for their massive success. Sure, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are brilliant programmers… and VP of Sales Omid Kordestani had the sales mojo to scale Ad Sense to a $10B business last year, less than 10 years after Google’s founding… but a lot of it was sheer circumstances and timing.
I’ve covered this before, but in a nutshell, it includes (from one of my previous pontifications):
I think everyone understands there will never be another Google because it benefited from a unique macro circumstance: little investment in competing search engines and new search technology due to the dot com crash and a unique micro opportunity: Yahoo!, the world’s largest portal, featured it. It also turned the anemic display, CPM ad market into an opportunity by offering CPC-priced text links…
Anyway, when Google bought YouTube, the jury was out on the brilliance of the move. YouTube catapulted Google into a leadership position. Video advertising will be huge. But, Viacom sued Google for $1B. Yikes.
Sure, the legal costs will end up being far less than $1B and I’m sure there’s a settlement at some point in that litigation. We can assume that YouTube has some kind of filtering process, otherwise, YouTube would be YouPorn, but it’s not. Why is that? I think YouTube is sex-free because YouTube has some kind of filtering mechanism in place… regardless, even with the best filtering process, it would be, I think, impossible for YouTube to fully prevent copyrighted material to be uploaded, especially given the fact that YouTube is heads and shoulders larger than everyone else in the space.
But, what if by introducing ads on premium content (disclamer: our WatchMojo.com unit is a premium content partner on YouTube) Youtube manages to upset its core users who upload UGC or copyrighted content… and these go elsewhere but more and more premium, professional content producers get lured to the site, enthralled by the potential of seeing Google’s ad muscles flexed…
And then, in 3, 6 or 12 months, Google’s YouTube headache (copyright violating material and really low quality UGC that advertisers don’t want) gets replaced with comment spam, hmm, I mean, professionally created premium content.
Yeah, don’t hold your breath… or, rather, if this happens, consider that this too was a matter of timing, circumstance and sheer luck.
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