May 17, 2007
@ 05:47 PM
Comments [4]
Robert Scoble's Faulty Analysis of YouTube Purchase

Robert Scoble has a blog post entitled Google to Yahoo and Microsoft: the $1.65 billion was worth it which contains the following excerpt

Ahh, now you all understand what I meant when I said YouTube is a moat, not a revenue generator. By putting YouTube results into Google’s main engine Google ensures it will have better searches than Yahoo and Microsoft (who were, truth be told, getting damn close to matching Google’s quality). And it does it in a way that Yahoo and Microsoft will not be willing to match. Seriously, can you see an executive at Microsoft advocating putting YouTube videos into Microsoft’s search results? I can’t.
...
Anyway, Google just distanced themselves from Yahoo and Microsoft. And they just provided a way to monetize YouTube videos.

I love Google’s strategy. It continues to mess with Microsoft’s strategy. Microsoft still treats each team as something that must make money. Google doesn’t do that. They didn’t care one bit that YouTube didn’t have any revenues. They knew that there’s other ways to make money off of YouTube than to force YouTube to monetize on its own.

Interesting analysis, too bad it doesn't pass muster when you look at the facts. So let's do that

  1. Google didn't need to spend $1.65B on YouTube to integrate their search results. An existence proof of this are video search startups like Blinkx and Dabble that index video from practically every major video source on the Web including YouTube and definitely didn't spend billions doing so. Secondly, Google has already announced that they'll index videos from sites they don't own. Does Robert believe they plan to buy every site whose video content they'll index?

  2. If Google doesn't care about monetizing YouTube why did the company transfer Shashi Seth to YouTube to work on monetization and what about the ads within videos they prototyped a few days ago?

A better analysis of Google Universal Search is that it is the ultimate manifestation of the Features, Not Products initiative. Google had too many search verticals with no way for users to find them (I used to do Google searches for Google Music Search before I could use it) and now they've remedied that in one fell swoop. Just look at what  their users had to deal with before they changed the search engine results page.

In case you were wondering the even more link goes here


 

Categories: Competitors/Web Companies

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Thursday, 17 May 2007 19:30:06 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I'm not sure what Scoble's been searching for--maybe himself--but Yahoo! and MSN were no where close to touching Google's quality (IMHO and solely empirical observations). Be it a code example, or friend's flower shop, it takes 3 terms or less and one search for Google to hand me the exact answer on page 1, often the first result. I want to like Yahoo! (since that's my home portal for news and stuff), but I had to dig (one 'g') through their results before I'd find anything close.

No, YouTube is all about monetization. You can't support a nearly $500/share price if you don't innovate, or at least innovate via acquisition. You could say that Google is taking a page from MS's playbook here. If you can't beat it, buy it!

Watch Blogger. It's only a matter of time before the adwords start showing up.
RJD
Friday, 18 May 2007 06:26:52 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Dare, you don't get it. The additional navigation links are only temporary. Most of it will go away eventually. I am pretty sure that the easiest way to get those links to go away in the coming months is to opt-in (i.e. personalized results). But I'm confident those links will disappear regardless of the opt-in.
Stephane Rodriguez
Friday, 18 May 2007 15:10:59 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Dare, I think you missed Scoble's point: while everyone could add YouTube links to their search indexes, his belief is that Yahoo! and Microsoft wouldn't do it if YouTube was a Google-owned property. Why not? Suppose they did, sending traffic into YouTube. Someday, Google figures out how to monetize on all that YouTube traffic. Yahoo! and Microsoft would be handing Google money--for free, without any kind of rev share deal in place. That'd be foolishness.

This was all a big cockblocking maneuver, it seems.
Dossy Shiobara
Friday, 18 May 2007 16:07:08 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Dossy,
This assumes that Yahoo! and Microsoft are stupid enough to reduce the quality of their search index by excluding the two most popular video sharing sites on the Web (Google Video and YouTube) out of petty spite for Google. This is obviously not the case as I showed in Robert's comments by pointing to search results from Live Search which include YouTube and Google video, see
- http://search.live.com/video/results.aspx?q=curtis+camron&go.x=0&go.y=0&form=QBXR
- http://search.live.com/video/results.aspx?q=youtube+star&go.x=0&go.y=0&form=QBXR
- http://search.live.com/video/results.aspx?q=how+to+blog&go.x=0&go.y=0&form=QBXR

Stephane,
Thanks for agreeing with me. Those navigation links in the screenshot are already gone from Google.com
Dare Obasanjo
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