Time Magazine recently called YouTube one of the biggest tech failures of the past decade, which was hilarious. Hilarious in that the site is by far and away the most popular site for video on the web, and has revolutionized the way we view videos, period. Today brings another amazing stat about the site: Every single minute, over 20 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube.
Think about that for a minute. In that minute, nearly a days worth of footage will have been uploaded. And the pace is quickening. Back in 2007, shortly after Google bought the service, it was 6 hours of footage being uploaded every minute. As recently as January of this year, that number had grown to 15 hours, according to the YouTube blog. Now it’s 20 — soon it will be 24. That’s insane.
It’s true that YouTube is not making Google any money, but when a site has this much dominance over a market, one way or another, there will be a way to effectively monetize it. The big Hollywood studios are already showing an increasing interest in using the platform, as are others — like ESPN.
Meanwhile, YouTube continues to become a bigger part of Google’s larger social picture. Today, the service added a way to immediately record a video response to a video after you watch it. Sure, this is basically what Seesmic has been doing for a while now — but Seesmic doesn’t have 20 hours of video being uploaded every minute.
And all of that video is stolen.
No it’s not what are you talking about….?
… that’s why when ever you upload something, you stick your domain on the video itself, then, if it’s “stolen”… it serves as an advertising platform
Jon
http://WoodMarvels.com – Create Unique Memories
youtube is rather killing small regional film industries.
and why can we report ONLY our own copyright (not others whom we know) infringement? why cant i report “take down notice” of my fav regional star’s video???? goog games the system with their copyright report, and should be fined heavily, and should be jailed too.
@stop piracy. There are lots of /b/tards out there, with too much time, who would report false “take down notices” for the lulz. Only the cat videos would remain.
I agree but lets not forget limewire and the rest of the pirates.
http://www.bueno.com safe place to be.
As if. I was hardly able to upload a demo reel of myself acting in something (little part) before a studio pulled the whole clip down.
14 hours of it, nothing but cat videos
Twibeo is a site that lets you say what you are doing using text, photos and videos.
Check out the multimedia Twitter.
http://www.twibeo.com
omg dude, are you going to post that link in every post?
You know the owl is an omen of bad luck, heads up!
*vomit*
Yahoo is one of the best services in the net – free, billions of video in all spheres of life, and so on.
YouTube isn’t just not making money, it’s losing hundreds of millions dollars. Until they can figure out how to monetize their product, or cut their bandwidth costs substantially, they are a failure.
Just where does that “hundreds of millions of dollars” number come from?
Agreed. They’re bleeding cash and yet, apparently, because they dominate the market, it will be so easy to monetize. So they’re getting 20hrs every minute – that just means more bandwidth, more servers & more money down the drain. Google has had plenty of time to turn the ship around, but they haven’t. I fail to see how it is going to be so remarkably easy to make money out of YouTube if it hasn’t been possible so far.
It is has been shown that user generated videos can’t be monetized or is hard to monetize.
“We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.”
3 hours of stolen cat’s ransom videos made by beer drinking dogs.
Boring video to watch.
What about vimeo ?
They’re too restrictive on what types of content they allow. They are the “sobs” of the video sharing industry and want all stuff on their site to be non-business related and all-original. Yet they offer no ad/revenue sharing for content creators and can (and have) yanked people’s videos off and closed accounts w/ no warning. Sorry, YouTube is about a million times better.
I meant “snobs” but “SOBs” works too, I guess.
thanks MG – one thing that I find amazing about the videos uploaded to YouTube is that so much of it is, well, ordinary. And i mean that in the best way. While the viral hits, the hot music videos, the stars of YouTube get a lot of press, just as inspirational are the millions of people using the platform to document their life and tell their story.
For example – traffic in New Delhi: http://www.yout...+delhi&aq=f
It’s our hope that being able to see and experience the world in this way will bring people together – we realize that even when thousands of miles separate us, we can get closer to each other through video.
Now just imagine how this will continue to explode when everyone has a videocamera in their pocket? AKA their phone.
hunter
(yt product manager)
I think that equals more of life being documented, which isn’t always a good thing as far as privacy goes. Just like people tagging my photos when I don’t want them tagged, people can upload videos of me without my consent. No longer do people care about removing the bad photos nor the bad videos. Everything and anything is game for being uploaded and that is nonsensical.
The trend with photos and video is they are being taken for documentation rather than because they contain any actual value. This creates a lot more noise than is needed.
LOL !!
Run a scan feed on the front page as they are being uploaded
We here in Florida have a saying
The last American out of south florida better have the flag with them – American Flag -
You don’t wanna know what we say about youtube
MG – I am with you – what is needed is a little patience. YouTube has made a huge impact on our society and Google will monetize it in due course. It is the scale in which it has risen that I believe leaves most people unsure what to call it. Have you seen all the advertising on the site? – Exactly – they will crack this nut.
“It’s true that YouTube is not making Google any money, but when a site has this much dominance over a market, one way or another, there will be a way to effectively monetize it.”
Really? I cannot believe I am reading that nonsense here. Perhaps you should take a look at XM -Sirius radio or countless other examples from the web
David, are you saying MG is full of it?
Let me see if I get this. 24hours of video uploaded every minute, and growing. And this is a good thing for YouTube?
The question is, at what rate is this “growing” thing occurring? If the growth rate becomes unsustainable, i.e. storage and bandwidth costs exceed revenue even after YouTube is fully monetized, then how is this a good thing?
So, MG, what’s the growth rate? And please stop drinking the Google juice! And the Twitter, FaceBook and Apple juices.
for the last paragraph!
Applause for the last paragraph.
I’m no fan of YouTube, because of the way the staff subjectively censored political content in the previous election, however it’s indeed a farce to call YouTube one of the biggest ‘tech failures of the decade’.
On the other hand… TIME may indeed be one of the biggest *media* failures of the decade. That’s no hyperbole.
Good point!
YouTube and online video is in adolescence at the moment, still a long way to go. Was either attention seeking, stupidity and/or a far premature statement to have called YouTube a failure.
its like opening a bakery, giving products for free, not worrying about costs and being excited how many people *like* it!
Seriously! Who ever said YouTube doesn’t make any money. What? The government is supporting it?
People make businesses to make more money, remember that. YouTube (except the social impact) is a business and you say “monetize”, but it’s rather more complicated that what the term implies.
>> called YouTube one of the biggest tech failures of the past decade, which was hilarious.
The truth hurts. I agree with Time that YouTube is currently a failure. Perhaps things will change in the future, but since their beginning they’ve never been profitable. If monetizing was so easy, they would have figured it out by now. They’ve tried many ideas. They’ve tried pre-roll ads, post-roll ads, affiliate links to Amazon, ads that stay at the bottom of a video, and ads based on search results. But they’re still in the red. Streaming and storage costs are much higher than a plain HTML content website. So even adding an annoying number of banner ads won’t help.
YouTube is the king of video. Its “The Place” where people go to watch videos. No one doubts that. But at the end of the day, they aren’t profitable. It’s a huge success if you’re a consumer, but not a success if you’re Google.
You say it’s a failure but then go on to state it’s the king of video? From a purely financial point, yes it’s a “Failure” but from any other view point it’s a bloody great success. Who cares if they’re losing money? They control most casual internet users now, through google.com, youtube.com, gmail.com etc, the money they lose is most likely worth what they gain from a user standpoint, they have direct access to most of the internet and that is priceless.
I think shareholders probably care. Google essentially has one income stream – web search. Almost everything else is bleeding. Ok, so they’ve got users, but that is not “priceless” unless it is possible to turn hits into money. This is not happening and cannot continue to happen indefinitely. The whole point is to make money and they’re not.
Napster was the king of file sharing — how often do people think about napster these days?
Its great that every minute such a huge amount of video is being uploaded. Youtube should be effectively monetized besides just the ads the appear beneath the videos. But Google must be making money some way or the other that could be beyond our knowledge.
Like some sort of Google magic?
I’m pretty sure the obfuscation in they’re reporting is indicative of the continuing lack of profitability. Lay off of the Google branded Kool-aid.
As a business, youtube is an outright failure. How is it genius to allow free hosting? I guess they were the first at coming up with an idea that drains that amount of money. Check out the bandwidth bill… case closed.
A business is to make money, Youtube doesn’t. And by the sound of your article, its going to get worse.
actually youtube wasn’t even the first to come up with free video hosting—
there was a ton of folks like gorillamask.net, filecabi, kontraband and others …
youtube was the first to have connected silicon valley types to get the millions necessary to give away free video hosting with no ads.
Companies like YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace all exist, survive and thrive in USA.
Such companies would have be forced to shut-down long ago, simply because many countries have arcane laws (which dont understand IT). eg: If a copyrighted video or porn is uploaded to any of these sites, their government (clerks) will shutdown the company itself, and will not be able to differentiate between companys fault and end users fault, and the fact that not every video can be reviewed before it is uploaded.
One example of such a country is India, this is the reason no products come from there, inspite of such a large developer community.
“would have shut-down long ago” read as ” would have shut-down long ago in many other countries”
if YouTube cannot be self-sufficient selling ads around it’s content then no other online video company can.
Therefore, if google started charging for you-tube everyone else would have to (Vimeo etc..). All those other video streaming companies are in the same boat as YouTube and are just hoping google works out a way to make money so they can justify all the investor money that they are spending.
I think google is going to eventually make a large part of it a subscription service. What have they got to lose? They’re aready losing 800 million dollars a year doing this, why not just half the number of users and charge the rest. Maybe they can break even…
I never would of sold out. Or I would of played my cards better and upped the ante if it were me, but it is not. Just so funny that Google still holds on to their google vids… I am waiting for the day when they snub vimeo. lol
meanwhile in China ….
http://www.web2...eo-hoster-youku
* On Saturday the 4th of April Youku had 146,803,100 video views which was up by 4.15% from the previous Saturday.
* Total view time amounted to 1,253,850,000 minutes — no, you’re not reading that wrong, that’s really 1.25 billion minutes. Which is almost 21 million hours, or 870 thousand days, or 2,385 years.
* Each video view lasted an average of 8.54 minutes, which is down by 2.45% from the same day last week.
* Average time spent per unique user on site that day was a second or two shy of 50 minutes.
* This past Saturday Youku had 25,091,500 unique visitors. That means, if you believe that there are about 300 million Internet users in China, that over 8% of all the nation’s Internet users visited Youku that day.
* Those visitors generated just over 200 million page views, up 4.31% from the week before.
* Each unique visitor generated about 7.98 page views, and about 5.85 video views.
* 8,245,800 searches were performed on Youku that day, up about 1.84% week-on-week, generating close to 40 million search result page views: that means that the average searcher flipped through just under five pages of results.
* Youku users uploaded at total of 60,050 new videos to the site, which is down about 4% and about normal for any given day: Uploads fluctuate considerably from day to day.
Youtube directly examines ordinary people.
every minute, a bunny is being killed.
Only zero-rest mass particles can travel at the speed of light. It is generally considered that it is impossible for any information or matter to travel faster than c, because it would travel backwards in time relative to some observers.
I recently heard a stat that more content was uploaded to YouTube in its first six months than was available from the big three networks during their first 50 years combined.
And lets not forget to give credit to the real founder of YouTube… Bob Saget.
love that show! stopped after season 6 but guess I’m gonna start again
“It’s true that YouTube is not making Google any money”
Absolutely false.
What is hilarious is that you’re such a dumbass that you think unmonitized eyeballs and big losses are reflective of success.
Business is definitely not your strength.
LOL, thats just way too funny dude! Way funny indeed! YouTube ROCKS
RT
http://www.whos-watching.se.tc
I’m surprised it’s only 20 hours per minute!
sometimes i just think Google wants all the information/content it can get. no matter what it is.
That’s a boatload of video. Can’t wait to see if/when G is ever able to monetize all that traffic.