I've been thinking for a while on that YouTube fenomena. Although it is great idea, sharing videos and that, what is the code that is worth all of that money. I don't have anything against the idea on making a website and then selling it for billions, but what is worth all of those billions.
Think about it for a while?
Page is like any other page, except you have the abillity to upload video in different categories. There is not anything new or revolutionary about that idea. Videos were shared even before youtube, and it would be shared even if there was no youtube. Every video has at least 5 megs, and servers that upload videos are logicly giant servers with huge harddisks, processor speeds and etc.
Those servers have to search and upload videos on user request, and bandwith used for that is enormous. I have my little website with 2 visitors (me, and me with internet explorer),and even with any content i spend about 200 Megs of bandwith. Imagine how much bandwith is spent on server that uploads 70.000 videos at one day. If that are the smallest videos of 5 megs, 5*70 000 is 350 000 Megs a day. Now when you count visitors of aprox 1 million a day which see 1 million videos of 5 Megs it is 5 000 000 megs a day only to look at those videos.
What is the price that google pays for that bandwith, and how can it be worthy to them?
I kinda have a feeling that google isn't telling us the whole story in that youtube thing, and i have my own opinion about it.
It is highly unlikely that google with all programmers working there isn't able to make website that is similar to youtube. But instead of making a website for themselves they paid enormous price of 1.6b& to two guys who coded the website.
Like any other companies google has enormous profit, i guess it is more than billions a year since they had money to pay that much for youtube.
There are two things that i think of?
First one is that google had it's development team working on that idea, and that team created youtube, but in order to cut taxes for profit they "secretly" payed it to some unknown guys in order to pay less taxes, or the other one which i like more is that google saw that idea good and paid lot's of money in order to inspire young programmers to develop, and learn new code, and to find new ways to implement it in www.
What do you think? How will the youtube payoff it's price, and how long will it take for it to do that

That's a good point, except for the conspiracy idea, which sounds a little implausible. But I think what they were "selling" was not just the code, but everything that came with it. The reputation, the massive community base, the videos. There could be ten other sites with similar code that are just as good, but none of them would be Youtube. The code itself is nothing without the community.

This post has been edited by glenstein: Feb 2 2007, 07:04 AM

1.6b is not a small sum to pay, especially for something they have the ability to create themselves but the issue here isn't what they cannot create but rather building on the brand name which is youtube. It is the most popular video sharing service on the net, and instead of competing against it with their own service, why not use it repackage it under Google and earn more money? I am sure there are a lot of revenue they would get in return if they take over youtube rather than continue to build their own service.

Yeah. If google just wanted a video service, they've had google video for a while now already. They bought the most popular blog service, blogger, and when youtube emerged as the biggest video sharing site, they bought that one also. They also took the longest running and most well known message boards, Usenet, and merged that into the realm of google. Wondering how they are going to acquire Wikipedia...

Google is the internet.

there are 2 things i just love about google. it's their search, and email. email is best couse it's add free, and i hope it stays that way. but google has branched more from search, and email to, like you said, blog and video. now they are finding a way to be the first ones to catch that video, and share it. i know internet is big, and there is space for everybody but if google tries to become "internet" then they will have to do much more than acquiring communities.

why don't they start with massive new cable layings in countries. they have to figure out the way to give us internet without the need of us paying to our ISP's.
i have to pay 15$ month for my 1Mbit (5Gb download). Now that price is just way off. I would rather pay that to google, which would then provide me with even faster internet. i'm bit ot now, but google needs to "come to earth" and build massive infrastructure for internet2 soon, or it wouldn't be fair to users using internet.

it can't leave us on mercy of our ISP's whom we pay so much for so little.. my idea is super new internet, which every user at his own home could have server, and address, but i just still can't figure out how to do it without digging and installing new wiress, but google could..

if i was about to start a new community, i would need domain (easy), server, (bit harder), and a lot's and lot's of bandwidth. Fast stable and quality bandwidth. Where can i get that at fair price?! Beacouse i want it to be ad free, but it can't be 100% free beacouse someone has to pay for those things.

Lol, they are actually doing this. In San Francisco at least. Article.

I was going to say ad revenues, but clicking through a few pages I can't find a single ad at all... and I can't find any info on some sort of "premium user" service or anything. If youtube isn't making any money now, my best guess is that Google has a plan for it. I doubt that a corporation would give away money just to avoid paying taxes on it, since they'd lose more money anyway.

I think YouTube deserves the huge amount of money Google paid on it. It's not about the programming part behind YouTube, but the idea the YouTube brand. Even behind Google there isn't so much programming, but the brand is important... There are lots and lots of search engines, but nowhere as famous as Google. When you say Google you say Internet.
On the Internet you get lots on lots of alternatives, the Internet is free. So the brand is really really important, because the brand gives them the edge in front of the competition.
Returning to YouTube... The idea was terrific... maybe it uses a lot of bandwidth and it requires a lot of servers, but it does the thing the Internet was built for... TO SHARE INFORMATION (KNOWLEDGE) FREELY. Google did not pay for the programming but it paid for the idea, for the brand... This is how the capitalist world works!