Is YouTube Doomed?
 

Seems that Google is losing massive $$$s on it, and apparently no current way to increase ROIs.|huh

|whisper|Maybe the porn tubes will have more to worry about than copyrights.|catfight|

YouTube will manage to rake in about $240 million in ad revenue in 2009, against operating costs of roughly $711 million, leading to a shortfall of just over $470 million. This half-billion dollar loss comes after more than a year of feverish experimentation in various forms of advertising, cross-product embedding, licensing and partnership deals.
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/...ed_2009_4.html

I don't see how these free tube sites will ever be profitable in the long run.

YouTube's operating expenses seem interestingly high ... I have to wonder if it includes staff to monitor for inappropriate material and copyright violations? The porn tubes we bitch about the most don't have that particular expense.

That is a good point, but I would suspect that most of their costs are bandwidth and servers. It would be interesting to see the details.

In general, I agree with Cleo. As the porn tubes proliferate, monetization will deteriorate, and I don't see the business model surviving.

I know many people will say that everyone said the same thing about tgp's. But, tgp's came onto the scene in a period of rapidly declining bandwidth costs. Bandwidth costs cannot repeat that rate of decline without going to free.

They're working on monetizing it. They'll get it there. I wouldn't say it's doomed just yet.

I would not say that youtube is doomed. Free porn tubes on the other hand are far more debatable unless it becomes a mainstream advertising medium.

Damn I hope not. I have a video of me autocrossing my vette and another of my dog howling on youtube. I would hate to see the world deprived of such compelling material.

For the sake of consumers, when bandwidth costs come down hopefully something like a wordpress for tube content will take off and people will start hosting their own videos and find ways to profit from it. I assume the YouTubes give themselves certain liberties with people's content in exchange for the service. Fuck it, people took their blogs off blogger when WP and MT came along. I'm tired of business people complaining about the theft of music, movies, and whatever, when television personalities make heavy use of YouTube content shot by regular people in their programs. And I assume the regular folks see not a dime.

There is one more wrinkle to consider. Some of the ISPs are looking at going back to tiered pricing. The more time you spend online, the more you will pay. It hasn't been stated yet if they are going to increase fees for 24/7 access, but it seems to be pretty definite that they will pay more than someone who just jumps online a hour a day total for email. IF this takes off, it will may well hurt hard.

google itself went forever with no ads. Now I am sure Google Search makes more than enough to cover youtube. Youtube isnt just a site. Its a Brand with Google Search, Gmail and such. They are working more and more to intergrate it all together..... and then take over the world :-)

It would a great day when free tube porn goes down. Most visitors to those sites want free and will not pay for anything, so why would vendors advertise on it? Once they start charging for access to make ends meet, what makes them different from a paysite?

you guys keep thinking the porn tubes dont make money

I am sure they do ... maybe their conversions ratios are 1 in 10,000.00 but with 40 milion users they still make a killing

these sites are making money .. bet on it

I dont see youtube going down, hardware will cost less and less in 5 years so I dont see how will they stop being online..

Money is very tight for a lot of people right now, and takes more than just purchasing the hardware. You have to have some sort of connection to the internet. ISPs have been hit by this economy, too, and even a few have gone out of business. The ones left can charge what they wish for connections, though I have not yet seen prices going up. Nost broadband connections in this part of the US are around 50 bucks a month. That is a luxury right now.

I don't see the tubes going down, but they will fade from popularity as soon as some other fancy flavor pops up. No denial they are making money or they would not have been as tenacious as they have been. I think a lot of the popularity has been the free access. They have advertisers lined up for the dollars and plenty who like free.

I remember when porn was on vhs tape. Hell, I knew guys that would rent a bunch of movies, make copies, pass 'em out, make more copies ,etc. Free porn was everywhere. Then came copy protection, then came ways around copy protection, and so on.

Free porn was a problem then, too...maybe even a bigger problem. But with digital content, it seems it would much easier to prevent unauhorized usage. I hear it's a hell of a lot harder to copy a BluRay than a VHS tape...:). There just has to be an industry wide push to make it happen.

i have heard about tube sites, i have seen them ....and i dont give a damn about them so i am not worried those tube sites will rule the world, they come and go........just like all other sites

And you win the bet. I was talking with a guy I haven't seen for a while on icq last week, he just finished the uni and told me he is working with tubes now and he told me yeah finally he is getting paid decently on this stuff, a lot of database work, php, encoder stuff, makes sure all the sites run and stream videos to the iphone etc. He is not even the owner.

Now all we have to do is figure out what the next fad is going to be (before it happens) :)

There are several of these sites turning a profit.
I know for a fact.

The visitors are still growing, eventually they will have their advertising money. Twitter has no ads with a ton of visitors burning up costs and they will eventually make their money too.