Top 10 Tech Failures of the Decade. YouTube...Really? | Hacker News Reader

Top 10 Tech Failures of the Decade. YouTube...Really?

time.com

12 pointstaylor16 comments

The New York Times recently wrote that "while YouTube, along with other new media properties like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, is seen as leading the challenge against traditional media companies, the company itself is struggling to profit from its digital popularity."

Open articleView on HN

Gateway (the Acer of American PC vendors.)

HD DVD (acronym overload, no differentiation from Blu-Ray.)

Vonage (like Skype, but with an AT&T syntax)

Youtube (low definition format, low comment intelligence, low interest cellphone videos.)

Sirius XM (financiers of Howard Stern lost to the Chinese $5 FM transmitter makers.)

Microsoft Zune (the portable version of Windows Media Player but only browner.)

Palm (HTML5 based "OS" might help you now, but I will never forgive you for that Pilot API.)

Iridium (never heard of them before Miami Vice, the movie, and never since. Lost to regional sat services)

Segway (a wheel-chair for the able-bodied; early adopters considerably dorkier than rest of population. Way too much of a "tourism office" gimmick toy than anything nowadays.)

All of them belong to that list, except youtube

Depends on your criteria for success, For the founders of Youtube it was an unqualified success. For Google trying to make a business out of it it's so far been frustrating to say the least.

That being said by this measure, Digg, Facebook and Twitter are in the same boat (or worse, since they haven't been acquired)

Thanks for the summary. They also listed Microsoft Vista (making 10).

And they left off: AOL Time Warner.

Yet another rehashing of the (inaccurate) Credit Suisse story.

the real story here, is that when you hit print, it doesn't show the entire article.

If the article is saying something stupid, why submit it here? Better to ignore it than post it and get no feedback beyond us calling Time stupid. That's not a valuable use of time.

On a monetary basis, Yes.

<sarcasm> biggest failure of the 1890s: the automobile.

More costly than a horse, less accessible than a train. How will there ever be a positive return on investment when it comes to the horseless carriage...

that and more when we return. </sarcasm>

But when they sold a car, they made a profit. When YouTube serves a video, they lose money.

In what year did the first car sell for a net profit?

Every car that rolled off the line would be sold for more than it cost to make it. Per unit, cars are profitable.

And even considering sunk costs like automobile design, management overhead, blah blah blah, every car sold makes the company money. They weren't sold at or under cost to entice people to buy them.

Whereas YouTube's bandwidth isn't free and every time they serve a video, they incur a cost that they don't get recompense for.

Sure, the automobile industry may not have been immediately profitable in the beginning (because constructing cars is a costly business), but don't confuse per unit profits with overall profits. YouTube had neither for the longest time and is only now dropping ads into videos.

You cannot under any circumstances make money giving your product away for free.

Define "free". Google gave their search away for free until they added advertising. Youtube serves ads as well, and obviously it's their hope that they can make ends meet.

Google is also an outlier. Hardly representative of business in general.

The original car makers did not have the problem of how to make cars profitable, theirs' was a problem of sales and marketing. Once a car was improved enough to make it affordable they received more sales.

Youtube certainly doesn't have a sales/marketing problem. It has a ton of traffic every day. Here the problem is that of figuring out how to make money in the first place.

It's easy to find examples of things that struggled at first only to become popular later, but at the same time there have also been products that struggled at first and still failed later.

When are we going to stop defining "success" by whether something makes lots of money?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com