If you want to change the world, start a company – or get yourself behind some really massive, growing scale.
But first, some YouTube stat porn.
Google’s video service now receives 35 hours of video every minute. That is about 6 years of video every day, with a weekly upload equal to 170,000 feature films. It gets 2 billion views a day, from an entertaining terrified baby to theatrical releases and dramatic journalism, like this tsunami footage. Through Facebook alone, YouTube shows 150 years worth of video a day (note: that is sort of a Facebook porn stat – since it has about 600 million participants, the video load works out to less than 10 seconds per person.)
Which is, we can agree, lots, and possibly growing at such a rate that the service eventually eclipse other means of video delivery not just in time but in revenues. New phones and tablets from the likes of Apple, Hewlett Packard and Motorola, not to mention Google’s Android operating system, make it even easier to load more. Either YouTube’s ad revenues will go up – which they are – or alternative methods (like conventional television) will fragment and lose revenue (which seems largely the case, too.)
The prospect of using YouTube’s scale to shape new business models is now a powerful motivation for working inside the place. I recently met three people working on that – Noam Lovinsky, who is in product creation of what he calls “the massive platform, the future”; David King, who works in issues of copyright and compensation; and Andy Stack, involved in analytics related to a video’s financial performance.
Lovinsky and Stack came to YouTube from their startups, which they had sold to both Google and Yahoo. King was a veteran of both Rhapsody and Peter Gabriel’s music startup. In each case, the size and reach of YouTube was a decisive motivator to be there.
“Everybody takes your call” when you are at YouTube, says King, so you can do deals. Even more, it takes Google’s resources to figure out how to track and manage the international rights for copyrighted works – there are five rights designations, on average, for each work, from singers to writers to holders of the payoff in different countries, and they all have to be seen and tracked. “It’s a problem all around the world, and there’s no way you’ll solve it without resources around the world.”
The analytics job, determining the right mix of preroll, in-stream, banners, and other ads and promotions to maximize revenue, is critical for attracting new talent that can bypass the old business models. Unlike Google, no one ad type seems to work best in online video -- it takes a variety.
In a deeper sense, YouTube is following the classic Google strategy of using the Web as a platform to empower more developers, creating a swarm bigger than anyone else can find. In this case, substitute “developers” for “bands,” “film makers,” and “those guys doing the Charlie Sheen parody."
“We’ve already got hundreds of partners making six figures a month year,” says Stack. “The thing that excites me is getting collaborators and creators to talk with each other – a lot of circular references create more overall views.”
Near term, YouTube will likely increase the swarm by convincing music publishers not to take down people who sing cover versions of songs, but rewarding them with split revenue deals. From there, it could extend into other third-party payments, like people who post snippets, as studios – much like Stack’s individual creators and collaborators -- seek to participate in what becomes the dominant medium.
Subscription models are also a possibility, says King. “It’s just a question of what extra freedoms the user gets with that.”
“Eventually the term “online video” will be over, says Lovinsky. “By the end of this year, there will be 200 million Web-connected televisions installed around the world. At that point, the definition of online video goes away – video is what is on the TV, or on a tablet in your lap, wherever.”
“It was time to join YouTube once they had copyright and monetization figured out,” he says. “It’s a rare seat, and a rare moment in time.”
