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Comment by pja | Hacker News Reader

It wasn’t just the lawsuits - IIRC YouTube the business was also bleeding money at a terrifying rate thanks to infrastructure costs (servers, bandwidth) even without the legal problems.

When Google took them on they were able to cut their costs to the bone by using capacity on Google’s internal fibre network which had been bought up cheap after the first dotcom crash & moving the data over to Google’s server infrastructure.

Could anyone else have bought YouTube & managed to turn the business around apart from Google? It seems to me that YouTube was one of those businesses that had negative worth to all except a very few buyers. Did anyone else have the infrastructure knowledge to do what Google was able to do at the time?

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It's interesting to look back from a historical point of view and realize that Youtube would've probably been closed down eventually just like Grooveshark, had Google not bought it and put its very best lawyers on the case.

Now look what Youtube has become. Can anyone imagine the world now without Youtube or a Youtube-like service?

Who knows what the world could've been if Grooveshark was also acquired by a big company and won its lawsuits. Maybe it would've turned into a major free audio-book platform, or a major podcast platform, or a major indie music artist platform (like how many new artists became popular on Youtube first).

The studios really are innovation killers in their quest to only be paid through the old business models. They only change when they have no choice but to accept the change (like when losing lawsuits against certain companies which they try to shut down). Then they act as if they encouraged that sort of innovation in the first place when they testify in Congress for new copyright laws.

Anyone still remember Turntable.fm? Yeah, they killed that one, too, and I remember it was seen as a highly innovative service.

The problem is that small producers loose out. Unless you are very lucky, its almost impossible to make money. Worse still Google are pernicious in their licensing deals.

I would postulate that Google is actually worse for small producers than your traditional record company. At least you could change record company and still distribute material.

If you upload to youtube, you loose exclusive licensing rights. worse still because they own the platform as well, you have no choice but to upload to youtube.

> If you upload to youtube, you loose exclusive licensing rights

Can you explain more? If a small producer uploads to youtube, they cannot upload to any other platform (eg iTunes)?

Say for example that you shot video A, you upload to youtube, everything is grand.

However time goes on, and you become successful, and google starts a netflix competitor, because you have granted google a non exclusive license to syndicate your content as you see fit, you don't get to charge more for your media being used to sell a premium service.

Google has the right to federate and syndicate on your behalf. Say you want to create a collection of videos on android in a folio app type thing, charging $1. There is nothing stopping someone else creating a playlist of the same content undercutting your product. Even worse, there is nothing to stop google using your copyright at the original rate, despite charging $1 a play.

The problem comes to negotiation, you can't unless you delete your content, and therefore your revenue stream. You have to play by their rules. You have two choices, take the pennies they throw at you, refuse to take the pennies, but google does what it wants anyway(as they already have a license), or delete the content. There are no other options.

> There is nothing stopping someone else creating a playlist of the same content undercutting your product.

You can turn of embed and syndicate permissions, preventing mobile, web and TV access. You can even unlist the video. Some combination of these would certainly stop anyone other than Google from creating a premium service with your videos.

> Say you want to create a collection of videos on android in a folio app type thing, charging $1.

But if your goal is "folio app type thing", there is no need to use YouTube at all. The whole purpose of YouTube is give your videos exposure and have them mix on a common platform. If you want to hide them, just self-host.

On its own youtube doesn't really make any money. It's only recently that its started to actually champion original content. (as in something approaching a tv station. not just nut shots.)

[http://www.quora.com/How-much-money-does-YouTube-make] (granted not the best of sources)

But we need to separate "value" from viable business. Twitter, unless it changes will go bankrupt. Its loosing around $160 million a /Quarter/

Value is a subjective thing, and can be manipulated to suit the needs of others. Earnings are meant to be empiric. If twitter was any other company, its stock would be worthless.

If we take a look at the buisness model of youtube: o Collect all video

o Flog adverts on those videos

o only take down copyright when notified.

o Sign deals to distribute promo material.

o Force small producers into exclusive deals with google at discount rates.

The signal to noise ration of profit making videos to not is terrible. I suspect that 99% of all videos uploaded to youtube are useless and have less than 100views. (https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html)

Without the backing of an extremely profitable company such as google, youtube would have failed. I'd assume it would have been sued out of existence, and if it didn't it'd have died under the infrastructure bills (they basically have free bandwidth and CDN)

>On its own youtube doesn't really make any money. It's only recently that its started to actually champion original content. (as in something approaching a tv station. not just nut shots.)

Maybe, but the first statement ("doesn't make any money") and the second ("only recently champions original content") have no logical connection whatsoever.

The could be making (or losing) billions with the existing videos they have. Making or championing "original content" is totally irrelevant to their money-making.

>* I suspect that 99% of all videos uploaded to youtube are useless and have less than 100views. (https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html)*

They just take disk space then, which is cheap and unimportant.

Probably should have read: >On its own youtube doesn't really make any money. It's only recently that its started to actually champion original content. (as in something approaching a tv station. not just nut shots.) in an attempt to drive up advertising revenue.

It strikes me that Youtube compete in several different distinct markets...

* Camcorder like footage of friends and family (competition with Facebook).

* Music videos (requires expensive licencing deals, competition with Spotify etc).

* TV/Films (competition with Netflix, Hulu etc).

Youtube has just turned into infrastructure rather than a service or community. It is more like a piece of the OS that is massively useful in a general sense, but not tuned to a particular use. The underlying technology (video that works) is just not special any more.

Without help from Google maybe they would have focused on one market and becoming something different.

Sometimes I think of Youtube as a modern Library of Alexandria[1], a repository of knowledge that could only exist through patronage and containing a sizable amount of resources that are valuable in their uniqueness. A failed YouTube would represent a loss of equally epic and/or mythical proportions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

> A failed YouTube would represent a loss of equally epic and/or mythical proportions.

Indeed. While most people may not realize until it is too late, my hope is that there are people out there working on plans to rescue large amounts of data from companies that may fail. Whether they be the government, wealthy individuals or organizations such as the Internet Archive, it would be a tragedy if all of this history was lost simply due to the financial failure of the company hosting the service.

An internet soapbox for anyone with a camera is hardly comparable to the concentration of written knowledge, skill and talent that is any library ever.

I think you're mixing up what YouTube does and what Wikipedia does..

YouTube holds a lot of unique content, documenting current times and events as they were happening. Given YouTubes relatively short existence, this is not obvious to everyone yet, but given just ten more years it will already start to provide an interesting glimpse into the lives of the people of the past. Imagine if we would have had the same insight about the people living in earlier centuries. Instead of us having to read about them in books, they could show it to us themselves.

I believe the Internet Archive (https://www.archive.org) along with sources such as YouTube, provided they survive, will be considered the most important to get insights into the lives of the common people for future generations.

YouTube was a long term play, 10 years ago storage and bandwidth costs where far higher, and 10 years from now there going to be lower still. Sure, HD video did increase there costs, but an HD video in 2015 is cheaper than a SD video when they started out. More importantly there not paying for most of there content making the long term outlook vary favorable.

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