Comments on: Hypothetical CEO – What Would YOU Do with YouTube?

By: Scott Branch

Scott Branch — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 07:02:56 +0000

This is a very interesting topic and one that poses a whole lot of problems both technically and in profitability. After reading the article I had a very bold idea to expand the presence of youtube and lower the bandwidth cost for them. There was talk of using a P2P technology to lower bandwidth and thus saving a lot of cost to youtube. If you can greatly lower the bandwidth cost then the amount of revenue you need to gain from advertising goes down dramatically. This could save the user experience from getting so bogged down with adds that users go elsewhere.

So with that said what is the bold solution. Well in order to effectively use a p2p technology you need a lot of users spread out geographically that are willing to offer valuable hard drive space and bandwidth sharing. The problem is youtube doesn’t have a current system for deploying this to the masses unless they all install a torrent client on their computers. They need to get into the homes of america and get on a device with a large amount of storage and is net connected. My big bold solution is one of two paths. Either acquire Tivo which already has a huge subscriber base and use the existing devices as P2P devices, or start your own DVR company and get the devices into as many homes as possible.

The technology could be easily scaled with some simple algorithms that allow content to be stored on user device (with their permission) for a certain period of time. For example recently watched videos would remain on the device and P2P enabled for 48 hours. And also, space dependent, any of the users favorites would automatically be stored on the device even if they haven’t watched them on the DVR itself. The user account would always be linked to the favorites, the P2P network, and since DVRs always stay on, its a perfect file share. Now if we could just address the upload speed.

By: Bhargav Patel

Bhargav Patel — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 16:56:22 +0000

Pay-per-view entertainment.

Cable is already doing this but some people(most now a days) watch movies/tv shows/sports on their computer whether it is legal or not, they don’t care. Most of them do not even know what is illegal.

Youtube can use your model to partner up with sports and stream live sports and charge less than what cable charges. Lets say $30/PPV. Youtube can give the sport channel $20 and keep $10 for them selves. They could also spend a little more (I would do this instead) and have their own system setup on game stadiums and strem directly from there. There would be only 1 time costs and some small costs to pay (only one time instead of per viewer) to the facility. This would help them a lot specially when they are already doing similar things with showing old movies on youtube.

PPV Movies.

They cost around 5-10 dollars depending on your cable provider. Why not charge $5 and keep only a $1 for them selves? People would go with youtube because of the video quality. Youtube have 720p now! Yey

By: Jued Martinez

Jued Martinez — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:51:52 +0000

Another model would be to charge for full length movies, like iTunes — except charge by the Hour 0.69 cents per hour, almost beats the dollar rental boxes.

$20.00usd a month, 30 hours of feature videos — we’re talking recently released DVD hit movies.

Sure they only keep 15% for delivery — but it beats their current take.

That’s an easy one though, probably too easy for top execs to see.

Unless they read this!

By: Jued Martinez

Jued Martinez — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:19:49 +0000

Append:
Give more income to YouTube, by them charging users a fee to embed their content.

Een if it’s your own content that you’re sharing — You’re still utilizing YouTubes’ Bandwidth.

So charging for Embedding Services make sense.

By: Jued Martinez

Jued Martinez — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:16:02 +0000

Not sure if this was brought up:

Charging for Embedding Videos!

A flat rate of .01 cent (or more) per view . . . would surely give more work to freelancers, and also give more income.

The model of YouTube charging for embedding Pay-per-views would generate income, while also presenting advertising revenue and being paid to do both.

Not too sure if I’d follow and embed ad much, but then again, I’m a freelancer. But it would surely up the ante for video delivery!!

Thoughts?

By: Toks Ogun

Toks Ogun — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:52:00 +0000

1. One thing google will pursue in the feature is video search and considering they have the largest library of video it would come in handy. I’m not sure how they would monetize this but there are a couple of methods.

2. Not all of youtube’s video content is questionable if they separate the wheat from the chaff I’m sure they could convince more advertisers to place ads.

3. They could pursue something like Revision3 which is premium content but not from the major studios.

By: ANDiTKO

ANDiTKO — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 23:32:16 +0000

1) They should make contract with the big corporations. A lot of the youtube videos are removed for copyright claim by big fat corporations like WMG. The Artist and the Bands should not make contracts with those corporations. Youtube promotes their music FOR FREE! Do you have any idea how many people discovered new music over youtube? Youtube Shuld Step up and do something about it!Youtube is like MTV and Radio Stations! They promote their music.
2)They must make a Vlog on their homepage with the most exiting videos.Based on Votes and maybe picked up by the youtube employees.So everytime you visit the homepage there will be something new and interesting.
3)They shuld show the rating of the related video so you can expect what you are about to see.
4)They should remove the FAKE videos (fake screenshots,non relative content, lots of keywords, etc) and warn the account holder.If the account holder has other warning they should delete his account or at least disable him for uploading other videos.

There are more stuff to do on youtube to make it better.I dont have the time to talk about it.Its their business, not mine!

By: George

George — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:37:51 +0000

This $470 million dollar loss is a big one. But if your a site thats getting MILLIONS of views a day you think what way can I turn some kind of profit out of thoes views? Easy – Ad Space. sell tiny 15 – 30 second time slots before each video. And the upside with this is more and more oppurtunitys become available as you do this. Then you can have PREMIUM members which can skip the ads and etc, etc, etc. So what I’m saying is YouTube is basically setup to start making revenue like they never have before, and this is just like any other site. If you have a CONSISTENT mass amount of members that visit your site well then incorpate something small that happends a # of times to the mass amount of people. Get what I’m saying?

Heres an example…

Lets say SMALL speaking

on an average

300K People login to youtube. Each of them watches 3 videos ON AVERAGE. ( I goto youtube once a day and watch a buttload of videos =P )

Thats 900k Videos watch. So say each of thoes had a Paid Advertisement infront of the video, at $.10 per advertisement. ( Some places pay a lot more! )

thats $90k. X 365 = 32,850,000

So thats $32.8 Million they could of made for doing basically nothing. Now this is on a small scale, as well as not including any other premium paid services they offer such as a paid membership etc.

Pros -
-Companys Consistenly buying TubeSpace ( Ad Space )
-Opens up the oppurtunity to offer Premium Memberships.
-Opens oppurtunity to allow artist, moviemakers, etc to pay to not have their videos advertised on?
-A good amount of revenue is being brought in.
-Plan does not affect the visuals of the main site.
-A Simple and non expensive method.

Cons -
-Maybe a possibly loss in a few members with anger management who don’t like to wait 30 seconds between each video?
-?

I’ll end my post with this.. I’ve been a consistent watcher at youtube since its been around and every once in a while I think to my self. How do they run this place? Like mentioned up there videos are not small and this site holds millions of videos at no charge to anyone! And day goes by still no fees or anything. So after hearing about this mega loss YouTube has taken I think its time, they take this step and implement this because its a simple and cost effective plan that may just say the company.

-George K.
-Age 15
-georgekuka@gmail.com

By: Sacha

Sacha — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:00:38 +0000

I would start by making the site easier to use, better looking, add new features, and improve video quality.

Sites like vimeo or blip.tv blow youtube out of the water on all these fronts, they just didn’t reach critical mass the same way youtube did.

Usually with two equivalent services, the better designed (in the general sense, not just graphic design) one wins in the end, which is what I think is happening with myspace vs facebook.

By: allahverdi

allahverdi — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 09:18:51 +0000

Hm… Well…

I’ll start from simple.
You say P2P for videos. So, what will people see when they didn’t pay? Low quality? Well i guess, it would suck
Well, more uploading for premiums isn’t good too.

But… Guys, everyone knows that sometimes people has trouble downloading videos from YouTube. What about when you’re premium user, you can download limited videos? Or monthly plan? Also, multi-formatted downloads. Not like only .FLV (flv convertors… duh…). Well it’s not bad. Cause, iTunes store sells musics, videos for money. But you can download that music for free and it brakes law.

They can make premium channels too. Like MTV will have a channel that will have great Music Videos which they can watch. Like $X for watching this channel and $X for downloading this video or so.

Not a lot of users will go to premium user, if there are no lifetime free. All are permissions. Personally I like YouTube. Watching Music Videos and etc. Sometimes i have problem(s) with country: “This video can’t be watched in your country” or so… They just can replace it: “This video/channel can be watched by premium users only”.