Ask HN: Why Did Google Videos Fail? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why Did Google Videos Fail?

15 pointsshamoo20 comments

What did YouTube do differently?

>What did YouTube do differently?

Youtube at the beginning had a lot more pirated content uploaded than Google Video. And Youtube did not discourage that type of viral content. It had more illegal copyrighted clips from movies, tv shows, popular songs, etc.

Based on interviews I saw, Google Video had a different philosophy. Susan Wojcicki was running it at the time and she originally thought Google Video would succeed because Google was "playing nice" by negotiating legal licenses with broadcasters like NBC. So in theory... Google Video would have the high-end desirable content (e.g. tv shows) that would be "better quality" than the amateur home videos on Youtube.

The theory turned out to be wrong because the pirated content that got Youtube into lawsuits was also what made them more viral and beat Google Video.

It's a counterintuitive example of a startup having less money than a big billion dollar public company like Google causes it to have a competitive advantage. Google eventually realized that Youtube was beating Google Video and just acquired them.

I wonder if a lot of innovation/growth is only possible for small companies because nobody decides to enforce the rules with them/hold them to any standard.

YouTube, Uber, DoorDash, Reddit, etc. all did something crucial early on that a larger player would have got in trouble for replicating.

I agree with the premise, but how do you see Reddit as an example?

From what I've heard, Reddit early on scrapped content from other sites. Mostly to actually make it seem like it had more users that it actually did. They stopped once they got to a critical mass of user generated content which was self sustaining. That's not exactly something that would fly nowadays.

Although, as Im researching this I can't find a source for this. So please correct me if I'm wrong.

They scraped other sites for content and created fake users to create the first wave of activity.

Not saying I disagree, but this feels like a very convenient narrative. What makes you think there was more piracy on YouTube, and how do we know that was the critical factor?

I am genuinely curious, because couldn’t we also use the old “Google is terrible at social and at making products for humans” as another narrative that seems to fit the facts?

> What makes you think there was more piracy on YouTube

My memory says that we went for the pirated stuff to youtube since it was absent on Google Videos. The latter worked way better UX-wise at the time.

This jibes with my recollection. I recall complaints that GV was aggressive about downing content that might be under some copyright.

In 2006 Larry Page had a keynote at CES where he announced the launch of licensed video purchases (movies, NBA games, etc) on Google Video. I was working on payments infrastructure at the time and we had a mandate to support X amount of spike traffic for that launch. Code Yellow, Jeff Dean in design meetings, all hands on deck, that kind of thing. As I recall that estimate for X was 2-3 orders of magnitude too high.

As someone that lived through it, two things stuck with me

1. YouTube just worked, it relied on Flash and that was installed on almost every computer. IIRC google video required some other plugin and it didn’t work great.

2. There was a lot more content to watch, probably because they were less good at filtering copyrighted content.

My memories are that Google Video worked fine without additional plugins, but I primarily used it to consume Google content (primarily their tech talks), documentaries, etc... YouTube really was all about short home-made videos.

The UX on Youtube was generally better.

One thing I did like in Google Video though, was that it allowed to download copies of the videos easily to save local copies. That appealed to the data-hoarder in me, I suppose.

In France, Google Video also failed to Dailymotion. Dailymotion failed dramatically a bit later for many reasons, some are political but also because of YouTube. It's still online but in a very sad state and it doesn't reflect what it used to be.

I mention Dailymotion because it wasn't as good as YouTube in terms of user experience and content, but it also won against Google Video, which was simply bad and unused in France, to be honest.

Because Google “invented” it as a competition product, and it wasn’t purely an ad product. It failed because of that. Then they acqua-hired YT to later transform it into primarily an ad revenue product (and now also a separate revenue product).

The UI, search functionality, and content quality were worse. YouTube out-competed them on everything they were trying to do in the year they were around. It was a better decision to acquire them than to try to continue building a competitor.

I was really into older (prob pub domain) black/white movies and Google Video had tons of them. Right after GV went down, most of them weren't to be found anywhere - so I lost interest in that culture and moved on.

I don't know if there's that much to it - they launched Google Video in January of 2005, and by November of that year, were already looking into purchasing YouTube, a purchase that they completed a year later (https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1433837480449613839).

Google loses interest in all sorts of projects, sometimes even when they're dominating their target market. More than anything, I'm amazed that Google Video lasted until 2012, considering it duplicated most of the functionality of their expensive and hugely successful acquisition.

> Google loses interest in all sorts of projects, sometimes even when they're dominating their target market

As big of an organization Google is in terms of people, I think this comes down to the CEO/Founders. You need someone visionary who cares about products more than just the money they will generate, and has a significant vested interest.

Google's founders checked out long ago and couldn't care less. The CEO is beholden to short-term profits, and everyone under him just want to maintain their good salaries, and enjoy the power of managing their dominions.

Everyone can just go some place else. And this trickles down.

I wonder how much it has to do with "Youtube" being superior brand name than "Google Video".

Speed of iterating product features:

* Google Videos had to do things the right way. It had to support tons of users on day 1. It had to ensure very high code quality.

* YouTube engineers were good, but they had lower bar to ship production code - probably they had less rigorous code review process or no code review at all; they just needed good enough infra And good enough code quality. Releasing v0.1 was cool, but the hard work was on the continuous / incremental improvement later. Speed is critical.

Contents

* the bar for videos on google videos was higher than YouTube’s, this fewer contents , which can’t cater to a broad audience

* YouTube had tons of home made videos. Even only a small portion of videos was interesting, it was still a big number. + long tailed contents for diverse group of internet users.

Luck

* consumer product is always hard. You need to have the right ingredients + right timing. Essentially , Luck plays an extremely important role in the success of any consumer facing products.

* knowledge work, especially creative work, is unlike manual labor. You don’t compete on the number of human labors. A tiny team might be able to beat a big corp in a very specific area.

* google leaders might treat google videos like a side project or a small bet. Resources are always limited. Best engineers & best marketing are always allocated to search & ads. Small bets need to fight for internal resources & corporate politics first. If small bets fail, employees get allocated to other projects, not big deal. With this kind of model, the small startup YouTube didn’t compete with google Corp. instead, they competed with a few not-the-best-employees in google who always had options to work on other projects. Had google allocated more resources to google videos, probably they might be able to do better.

> It had to support tons of users on day 1

It's funny how this is a requirements for all new Google products, but if you look at most new innovative products they started out with a handful of users over months/years.

There is something inherently unreproducible that startups have over large companies.

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