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Youtube remains unprofitable 3 years after Google acquisition

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Re: Youtube remains unprofitable 3 years after Google acquisition

#11

Post by req2 »

tom_rath wrote: post #6
radioactive21 wrote: post #2

it is not direct profits but it is indirect profits and strategic intentions as the reason google bought it. google wants you to use its services, the more you do the more you depend on them. video, voice, data, etc. they make profit as a whole, so you cant look at one unit and say it doesnt bring in profit. the longer you associate google with your video, voice and data needs they win.

Actually, the more you use Google's free services the more you cost them. It's the non-techies who are clicking their ads which are making money for Google so, for all their technical marvels, Google's revenue source(s) are pretty narrowly defined. I can almost picture Steve Ballmer slapping his cheeks with a mocking "Oh, no! Google's dominating yet another money-sucking cost pit! Whatever shall we do?!?!" before bur…

Have you seen youtube comments? They probably are coming from the non-techies.

Re: Youtube remains unprofitable 3 years after Google acquisition

#12

Post by vijayr »

patio11 wrote: post #8
vijayr wrote: post #3

video search isn't big today, but it'll probably be huge in the future, may be as big as text search if not bigger. same can be said about video advertising. at that time, who do you think is going to have tons of inventory at their disposal? Google it is just part of a bigger strategy - text search, book search, audio/video search etc. youtube is a long term investment. as long as G has money to keep it running/impr…

Video search isn't big today because there is exactly ONE use case for it: [heroes season 2]. Text search works perfectly fine for that -- you type in [heroes season 2], you will find Heroes, season 2. It is probably one of the best single domains for searching -- canonical or near canonical names for everything, with disambiguating numbers that users actually know , and built-in metadata which links all your canonic…

what if I am searching for a particular scene (say a 2 min scene), in a particular episode of heroes, in a particular season?

Re: Youtube remains unprofitable 3 years after Google acquisition

#14

Post by snewe »

Important point about the cost of the original acquisition:

"Even so, it’s important to remember that Google paid for YouTube in stock, not cash, that represented a tiny fraction of the company’s total market capitalization. (The deal was initially valued at $1.65 billion.) And immediately after the merger was announced, Google’s shares rose, which in some sense seemed to pay for the deal on its own."

Re: Youtube remains unprofitable 3 years after Google acquisition

#15

Post by ori_b »

vijayr wrote: post #12
patio11 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video search isn't big today because there is exactly ONE use case for it: [heroes season 2]. Text search works perfectly fine for that -- you type in [heroes season 2], you will find Heroes, season 2. It is probably one of the best single domains for searching -- canonical or near canonical names for everything, with disambiguating numbers that users actually know , and built-in metadata which links all your canonic…

what if I am searching for a particular scene (say a 2 min scene), in a particular episode of heroes, in a particular season?

How can you automatically detect that from a video? And if instead of automatically detecting it, you just let the users tag the video, why does text search not work? Finally, even if they manage to get a useful video search working, why do they need Youtube for it, when they can crawl the web for video?

Re: Youtube remains unprofitable 3 years after Google acquisition

#16

Post by vijayr »

ori_b wrote: post #15
vijayr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if I am searching for a particular scene (say a 2 min scene), in a particular episode of heroes, in a particular season?

How can you automatically detect that from a video? And if instead of automatically detecting it, you just let the users tag the video, why does text search not work? Finally, even if they manage to get a useful video search working, why do they need Youtube for it, when they can crawl the web for video?

How can you automatically detect that from a video?

that is the point I'm trying to make. it is not possible today, I guess it will be possible in future.

how much can you tag? and who will do all the work of tagging? it has to be automated, like text search. video search is going to be much more difficult than text, and G has tons of videos to mine and refine algos.

Re: Youtube remains unprofitable 3 years after Google acquisition

#17

Post by e1ven »

ori_b wrote: post #15
vijayr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if I am searching for a particular scene (say a 2 min scene), in a particular episode of heroes, in a particular season?

How can you automatically detect that from a video? And if instead of automatically detecting it, you just let the users tag the video, why does text search not work? Finally, even if they manage to get a useful video search working, why do they need Youtube for it, when they can crawl the web for video?

Google is working on this- One theory is that part of why they are working on Goog411 is to increase their voice reco engine, so that they can apply it to Video and Audio search.

Google hired several engineers away from Nuance (one of the leaders in voice recognition), and they're working hard on growing their development there.

Re: Youtube remains unprofitable 3 years after Google acquisition

#18

Post by tom_rath »

moe wrote: post #10
tom_rath wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the more you use Google's free services the more you cost them. It's the non-techies who are clicking their ads which are making money for Google so, for all their technical marvels, Google's revenue source(s) are pretty narrowly defined. I can almost picture Steve Ballmer slapping his cheeks with a mocking "Oh, no! Google's dominating yet another money-sucking cost pit! Whatever shall we do?!?!" before bur…

I think Ballmer stopped laughing at google sometime between them crawling out of their garage 10 years ago and them approaching MSFTs market cap today.

Until GOOG approaches MSFT's revenues, I don't think Microsoft will worry. If there's a 'war' between those two companies, Microsoft is probably handling it as one of attrition.

Google has one strong source of revenue (search advertising) and has been thrashing about for years in an attempt to build at least a second source without notable success.

Microsoft has many different sources of revenue and continues to build on each. To take out Google, all they have to do is have Bing, Yahoo and the rest patiently chip away at GOOG's search advertising dominance by a few percentage points each year and that revenue will dry up. Then, without that revenue, all of Google's vanity projects will collapse in a heap.

Google's many projects remind me of the Flying Lawnmower: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNWfqVWC2KI

You can make anything fly if you have a strong enough engine shoving it and Google's engine is its search advertising revenue. Once that revenue decreases enough, their lawnmower will fall to earth, and Microsoft is surely happy to see them tack on new expensive doodads like YouTube and Chrome O/S to hurry that day forward.

Re: Youtube remains unprofitable 3 years after Google acquisition

#19

Post by ShabbyDoo »

Google may be playing up the notion that YouTube is very unprofitable. Making VCs think that online video is a bad business will help reduce new competition. And, unlike eBay's Skype acquisition, there's probably little shareholder pressure for Google to prove that it made a good choice.

Re: Youtube remains unprofitable 3 years after Google acquisition

#20

Post by calambrac »

patio11 wrote: post #8
vijayr wrote: post #3

video search isn't big today, but it'll probably be huge in the future, may be as big as text search if not bigger. same can be said about video advertising. at that time, who do you think is going to have tons of inventory at their disposal? Google it is just part of a bigger strategy - text search, book search, audio/video search etc. youtube is a long term investment. as long as G has money to keep it running/impr…

Video search isn't big today because there is exactly ONE use case for it: [heroes season 2]. Text search works perfectly fine for that -- you type in [heroes season 2], you will find Heroes, season 2. It is probably one of the best single domains for searching -- canonical or near canonical names for everything, with disambiguating numbers that users actually know , and built-in metadata which links all your canonic…

Um, what? You really think the only use case for video search is finding particular clips with known titles? There's an entire industry around stock photos/videos that right now relies almost entirely on manual tagging, you don't think that field's ripe for search? Or the petabytes of video being streamed from security cameras, you don't think anyone out there wants to search that for faces or license plates or whatever? Video search is going to be absolutely killer, and Google's sitting on top of the largest, most varied training corpus in the world, thanks to YouTube.
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