doodahman:

Farhad Manjoo:

"All ad revenue is down because disposable income is down and most of what is advertised cannot sell in this environment, like it did five or even two years ago. Look at what TV is living off of in terms of revenue right now-- bankruptcy attorneys, glorified pawn shops, and work at home scams. You see a lot of consumer products moving around these days? I don't. I see a lot of truck beds stacked five high around the train yards." I didn't say YouTube's ad revenue was down. It's not. It's up (see links in the piece). That's the problem: It's never made a profit, even during the boom. Its troubles aren't recent; they're inherent to the medium. That's why Hulu is doing better than YouTube even though they're both -- obviously -- operating in the same ad market.

I've only recently checked out Hulu, so I'm not clear on how it is the same or different than what's on Youtube (I was just trying to show my daughter an example of the late great Phil Hartman's "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer"-- for purely scholarly purposes, of course-- but of course, they've all been refrozen by the IP Ice Age)

so when you say, "inherent to the medium" aren't you just reiterating that it's a matter of high bandwidth costs rather than content? If your thesis was correct, then YTube would ditch the crap you say advertisers won't sponsor and just put up the shit they do sponsor- which would A: substantially reduce the number of views; and, B: substantially increase the licensing costs. Or, rather, sites that trafficked only in licensed material that is ad supported on TV raking in proportionate revenues on the site.

I don't know. Having been raised in a free TV world only to grow up into a $45 a month cable bill world for essentially the same amount of "entertainment", this just seems another feature of the old "rent seeking" behavior where it's only about getting a gov't license to steal. They take what's free and then after generating sufficient interest, figure out a way to attach a viewer cost to it because they have legal control over distribution. Like any other seller of addictive substances.

Hulu plays popular shows (It's a Fox and NBC joint venture I believe) and older movies. They stick 30 second ads in at certain points. So it's like a YouTube for production-generated content, and the legitimate advertising. It's basically TV on demand.

So what you said about YouTube ditching the stupid, unwatched user stuff basically. It looks like it actually will work, which is something you can't say about a lot of stuff on the web these days.