YouTube Serves up 100 Million Videos Daily Online

[engine]

YouTube, the leader in Internet video search, said on Sunday viewers have are now watching more than 100 million videos per day on its site, marking the surge in demand for its "snack-sized" video fare.

Since springing from out of nowhere late last year, YouTube has come to hold the leading position in online video with 29 percent of the U.S. multimedia entertainment market, according to the latest weekly data from Web measurement site Hitwise.

YouTube Serves up 100 Million Videos Daily Online [today.reuters.co.uk]

[weeks]

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported today that Movielink will soon allow consumers to legally download movies over the Internet and burn them onto DVDs. Or, at least they have the technology that will allow it.

"The DVD-burning software from Sonic Solutions, of Novato, Calif., would have copyright protections built into it so that a customer couldn't make repeated unauthorized copies of the movie. Right now, consumers can purchase or rent movies online from Movielink and its competitors, but they can't burn them onto DVDs. Instead, they can watch them on their computers, burn them onto discs that work only in computers, or rig up a home-networking system that streams the movies onto TVs."

I'm so old I remember when there were just three channels of TV. Soon (now?) there will be unlimited channels of video.

[rohitj]

Wow, I wonder the type of commits youtube has with bandwidth providers?

[Iguana]

I love YouTube. Many of my music blog posts include a video of bands playing songs - most, I imagine subject to some sort of copyright. I have uploaded a few videos myself but I asked the bands involved for permission.

I think, post embedded videos now because YouTube may not be here soon. I see no revenue earning model.

[zCat]

[youtube.com...]

* founded in a garage - check
* 7-digit venture capital - check
* business model involves "exploring a range of possibilities" - check

The late 1990s just called and they want their deja-vu feeling back.

[superpower]

As mentioned by Iguana...

Anybody care to chime in on what you think the revenue model is and how much cash they are burning through right now?

I don't see how this is sustainable.

[netchicken1]

My goodness!
How do they pay the bandwidth?

There must be a fair proportion of the entire net bandwidth tied up in youtube by now....

[Jane_Doe]

Anybody care to chime in on what you think the revenue model is and how much cash they are burning through right now?

My kids and their friends really like youtube, but I don't know anyone who spends hours on their site who is old enough to have their own credit card and is able to purchase items online.

[edited by: Jane_Doe at 12:46 am (utc) on July 18, 2006]

[physics]

Anybody care to chime in on what you think the revenue model is and how much cash they are burning through right now?
I don't see how this is sustainable.

People said the same things about Google...

[santocki]

Only if you are the Big Daddy, yes... it is possible to create revenue model... just like listening to musics at Yahoo Music which I enjoy a lot now, much cheaper than CD and can find almost anything instantly...

[rjbearcan]

I have read articles that gave estimates that they burn through $1 million/month. If I can find those articles again, I will post them. Youtube won't be around much longer, I would be surprised if the VC's will put up with them until the end of the year. You just know that the more press Youtube gets, especially negative, the happier Brightcove gets.

[superpower]

People said the same things about Google...

I don't think most people said that about Google. They've had an obvious revenue model for a long time, almost the beginning of the company. Even went they weren't selling contextual ads they had plenty of advertising to support text delivery.

Search can be done with minimum infrastructure. For example, Gigablast. Wikipedia is another mainly text-delivery system which has minimal infrastructure and costs vs. users.

Audio/Video is a completely different beast. It requires way more minimium infrastructure (on a per user basis), also it's much more difficult to scale.

In other words, each user represents a much larger cost.

Therefore the margins would be lower on comparable advertising. Also, it is more difficult to do contextual advertising which means a lower CPM.

Am I wrong?

[physics]

superpower: where was the plenty of advertising before adwords? Did you see banner ads plastered all over the google.com home page that I missed? From my understanding pre-adwords they were funded well by VCs but essentially losing money. Search is not as cheap as you might think when you do it on the scale google does/did.

[walkman]

they can play a 10 sec commercial before each video, no? I wonder about copyright laws given that much, if not all, of the material is copyrighted by someone else.

[zCat]

One possible business model is "acquire massive user base, brand-name recognition, sell to major portal / media conglomerate".

[superpower]

Did they not have any advertising pre-Adwords? I'll concede I could be mistaken on that point. I was just going based on memory that they tested banners and non-contextual text ads but I can't find anything to support/deny that.

It's interesting to look at some of the numbers on delivering various content (back-of-the-envelope comparison only).

For example, Wikimedia delivering mainly text uses the following in it's main colo: 130 servers, 200-350Mbps, 1000-3000 hits/s ¦ 150M hits/day.

According to the wikipedia entry on streaming media: "One hour of video encoded at 300 kbit/s (this is a typical broadband video for 2005 and it's usually encoded in a 320×240 pixels window size) will be: (3,600 s · 300 kbit/s) / 8,388.608 = 128.7 MB of storage if the file is stored on a server for on-demand streaming. If this stream is viewed by 1,000 people, you would need 300 kbit/s · 1,000 = 300,000 kbit/s = 300 Mbit/s of bandwidth"

So in other words, if I understand this correctly, 1000 hits watching video for an hour (at that encoding) would require the same amount of mbits (bandwidth) as 1000 hits ***per/second*** reading wikimedia pages. Think about the infrastructure to scale up to the kind of user traffic that Wikimedia has...

Any multimedia technical people out there to throw out some numbers on how much more difficult it is to serve multimedia content?

[rohitj]

a million a month isn't that much in the grand scheme of things for a company with this much hype. and even if their audience does not have a credit card, there are many advertisers trying to advertise to the younger demographic. Just the other day, in fact, I was reading about the value of marketing to 4 and 5 year olds. I can imagine that for them they pay sub $7/mbps and likely could negotiate even better deals on bandwidth with various providers at rates unheard of. After bandwidth, there doesn't seem to be that much expense. Maybe hardware but now days they have 750 GB hard drives at affordable prices in bulk..

[Garfieldt]

I'm sure those venture capitalists wouldn't have given youtube 11.5 million dollars if there wasn't a clear business plan from day one. They are probably just building their brand first and will introduce advertising or fees later on.

[walkman]

>> I'm sure those venture capitalists wouldn't have given youtube 11.5 million dollars if there wasn't a clear business plan from day one.

Regardless of Youtube's future: You make it sounds like VCs never make any mistakes, or never fail.

[wellzy]

wow. I thought I was the only one who used youtube ;)

[walkman]

And so it begins: "YouTube sued over copyright infringement"
"Those in the video-sharing sector have for months expected someone to challenge YouTube in court. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company lets users post videos to its site without prescreening them, and a staggering amount of copyright video exists on the site. YouTube prohibits the uploading of such material but has also benefited in the past when someone has posted a professionally made clip that catches fire with the public."

[news.com.com...]

[wmuser]

That was expected,i was wondering why no copyright holder has sued them yet.

Anyway the level of success they made in a year is tremendous