YouTube Myth Busting
ytbizblog.blogspot.com
ytbizblog.blogspot.com
Yeah, if movie theaters were free and instead of you going to them, they came to you. If there's an "equivalent" to 165,000 tickets on an opening weekend of a Hollywood movie, it's probably closer to 165,000,000 page views. And that's in how much revenue is generated--for the production company, a film playing in an actual cinema would rake in more than a YouTube release of equivalent revenue, because your local movie theater makes almost nothing on ticket sales while YouTube probably makes a significant percentage of ad revenue. It's not like YouTube can give all ad revenue to content creators and sell overpriced popcorn and soda, after all.
However, a movie like clerks could be vary profitable online.
At a 5G commit you're down to $4/Mbit, over that it gets quite a bit cheaper still.
Youtube is consuming thousands of times that quantity.
(the 5Gbit/sec will serve out 10K streams @600Kbps)
Another good trick they pull is to cache videos that are requested frequently in or very near to the colocation offered by the larger ISPs.
No they aren't. Myths are busted with science and testing and experimentation. All this article did was contradict the myths. It did nothing to show the truth or falseness of the claims.
If you are going to use something like the high quality show, Mythbusters, to model your contradictions, you should learn something about science from the show and actually prove whether or not your contradiction is true.
This post didn't even come close to doing that.
This is a primary source. If YouTube says that more traffic makes YouTube more money, nobody else is in a position to contradict them.
I believe that lying about that in public could have legal repercussions.
There are artful ways to say true things that make the reader jump to conclusions that they intend, but are false.
For instance, by claiming that they are in a position that growth is good, they make us think they are making profit per view, but that isn't what they said. They could have any number of non-profitable reasons to like growth, like strategic market share or building a huge content database.
Further, their refutation that advertisers are not afraid of YouTube may lead some readers to conclude that 70% of Ad Age Top 100 Marketers are paying YouTube directly, whereas many (most?) are not. They are either using YouTube as part of a social media campaign or advertising within some user content hosted on YouTube.
It's not clear at all what's happening on their balance sheet, so speculation will continue. To what end, I don't know, but after "What is Twitter's business model?", guessing how much money YouTube burns a year is the Valley's favourite party game. ;)
If you adopt this position, then even "hard facts" won't satisfy you, since, again, they'd have to come from YouTube, a source you don't trust.
To be honest, that's the position I'm in; I don't trust them on this point, though I don't particularly care, either. I quite carefully didn't say that the claims are true in their most obvious form, merely that this is as good as it is going to get for now, and in particular, that there is no applicable "science and testing and experimentation" to be done.
So on your particular quote, the spin is simple. Define "more money." I would guess that the sentence that inspires that is "We are at a point where growth is definitely good for our bottom line, not bad." Which basically doesn't say much of anything. How much growth is good for the bottom line? How do they define the bottom line? If you invested 2 gazillion dollars in hardware and it's all sitting idle, then any growth at all (even 1 extra view) is good for the bottom line.
"Myth 5: YouTube is only monetizing 3-5% of the site. This oft-cited statistic is old and wrong, and continues to raise much speculation. In our view, the percentage is far less important than the total number of monetized views..."
They say it's old and wrong, but don't give the real percent, and spin in terms of "total number of monetized views". Based on this answer I'd guess the percent of monetized views isn't much higher than the "myth", otherwise they'd have a better spin.
If everyone thinks even the mighty Google can't get YouTube to break even, then no one else will try to compete with them in video, and when they get around to figuring out how to make money, they will own the entire whole short video market.
Meanwhile, Google overall remains a desirable place to work in the eyes of many engineers. And Youtube advertisers care about how effective their ads are relative to what it's costing them, not whether or not Google is making money from Youtube. There may be some concern over the long-term availability of Youtube as an advertising channel if it's not making money, but do you need to think about that when you need to run an ad campaign right now?
So I mean, I don't really believe all the spin either, but why tell anyone else otherwise? They don't certainly aren't out to raise funding either...
Myth 3: Traffic, growth, and uploads are bad for YouTube's bottom line. There's been a lot of speculation lately about how much it costs to run YouTube. With revenue estimates ranging from $120 million to $500 million, and costs on an equally large spectrum, it seems people can pick any number to fit any theory they have about our business. The truth is that all our infrastructure is built from scratch, which means models that use standard industry pricing are too high when it comes to bandwidth and similar costs. We are at a point where growth is definitely good for our bottom line, not bad.
These myths aren't "busted," they just refuted reported numbers with "that ain't true!"
*Just kidding YouTube. I love you, and I know you'll get better stuff than old "Starsky and Hutch" episodes any day now.