YouTube Vs MySpace

YouTube hype machine is cranking at a zillion RPMs a minute. A profitless IPO, a billion dollar sale to one of these half a dozen companies, lawsuits, illegal content and how it helped them become what they are. The latest is this concept floated by The Guardian that it is bigger than MySpace.

The video sharing site has taken a 3.9% share of global internet visits a day compared with 3.35% for MySpace, according to internet analysis company Alexa.

However, the data from Hitwise is the quite different from Alexa data used by The Guardian. For the week ending July 29, 2006 MySpace.com received 4.73% market share of visits versus the .23% market share of visits for YouTube.com. For the week ending July 29, 2006, MySpace was ranked #1 based on market share of visits (please note Hitwise breaks out domains of larger properties) while YouTube was ranked #29. (According to Hitwise data based on market share of visits, MySpace was ranked 6th for the week ending July 30, 2005 while YouTube was ranked 80,628.)

Written by Om Malik on August 1st, 2006 with no comments.
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Online Videos & Playing Into Apple’s Hands

Online video is the big story today… again. From CNN to AOL to Lulu.TV - everyone is talking about online videos, which begs the question - How many video sharing sites do we need.

We had asked this question nearly a month ago in the pages of Business 2.0 magazine. The frenzy clearly has gone to the next level. Amazon has jumped into the fray. More money is being pumped into the sector. Revvr for instance is getting more cash from Turner and Comcast. You Tube founders dream of an IPO.

All this on a Monday morning, makes one want to scream: Stop the madness!

Forget the video sharing sites for a minute, and instead lets focus on the pro-video content market. That’s essentially television shows and music videos for now, but movies are around the corner.

If you include AOL’s decision to sell videos for $1.99, you can buy this “pro” video content from Google, Amazon, AOL, Guba, FOX, and Apple along with scores of other sites. This content is mostly for PC viewing, though it will work on portable devices, such as iPod and Sony PSP.

This is reminiscent of the digital music market, which is chockfull of players with marginal market share. Apple’s iPod/iTunes dominates the market because it provides a stress free (some call it integrated) experience for the end user.

One stop shopping is a powerful concept, and as we see more and more “online video sales outlets” pop up, there is more than likely chance that consumers are simply going to gravitate to a stress free experience. This is precisely what Apple wants, sort of: now that you have tried the rest, how about just sticking to the best.

And as for the amateur video sharing sites… you don’t really need it spelled out.

Written by Om Malik on July 31st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Google and Apple and AOL and Online Video and YouTube.

VoIP Quality from bad to worse

Brix Networks, a company that develops monitoring tools for service providers, analyzed data it gathered from a Web site it created a couple of years ago called TestYourVoIP.com. The site does a bandwidth test and allows consumers to test the quality of their VoIP services. In its study, published Monday, the company stated that call quality has declined by about 5 percent in the past 18 months. Further, nearly 20% (1 in 5) VoIP calls have unacceptable quality.

This seems overly inflated to me. Surely, 20% of calls can't be that bad or customers would switch from VoIP back to landlines. Me thinks this study is skewed to help build some publicity for Brix Networks. In fact, several bloggers and newsites have covered this study already.

Also, part of the About Brix Networks states, "to offer reliable and high-quality experiences in voice, video, data, and mobile services". So obviously, it behooves them to say that QoS monitoring is necessary - that's the service they sell.

Or perhaps Brix Networks in in cahoots with strong net neutrality proponents to try and prove that net neutrality is needed to prevent the cable MSOs, and broadband carriers from "squeezing" out VoIP players by throttling their bandwidth.

Or it could simply be all those MySpace blogs and YouTube videos clogging the damn Net! You make the call.

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Tags: cable, call quality, carrier, myspace, net neutrality, qos, video, voip, youtube
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Written by VoIP & Gadgets Blog on July 25th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on VoIP and MySpace and video and cable and qos and net neutrality and YouTube and call quality and carrier.

The Rise of the Socially-Integrated Media Empire

Rupert Murdoch build his media empire, News Corp, the old-fashioned way… by vertically and horizontally integrating deep and wide into the layers of the media industry (e.g. from production to distribution). But with his acquisition of MySpace, Murdoch has gone down a new path… a new dimension of strategic corporate development that I like to call “social integration”.

Just as the name implies, social integration targets the ownership of critical assets in the social media supply chain (e.g. social networks like MySpace or People Aggregator, socially-programmed video services like YouTube or VideoEgg, social photo services like Photobucket or Flickr, socially-curated news sites like Digg or Newsvine, etc.). But in a radical departure from the old vertical and horizontal integration strategies of traditional media, social integration recognizes the fact that social media, by definition, shifts much of the media supply functions directly into the hands of the audience itself.

In other words, with social media, the consumers are in control of production, programming, and distribution … which is a complete reversal of the traditional media model. This reversal in control leads to some interesting consequences, the most obvious being the impact it has on the translation of core competencies within traditional media organizations (they become largely obsolete in the context of social media). But the greater long-term consequences of social integration involve strategic market development.

As social media continues its stunning incursion into the overall media landscape and usurps valuable mindshare, particularly from the younger demographic, the degree to which a traditional media company socially integrates into its audience is rapidly becoming the proxy for its ability to survive the future. But in order to survive via social integration, the players must first understand the real strategic implications of social media.

Many traditional media companies view social media as sort of a “farm league” and a promotional vehicle for Hollywood, one that will augment but not threaten their existing brands, copyrights, talent, and superior storytelling resources. This is a critically flawed view and it’s reminiscent of the strategic mistake that AOL made during the ‘90s. AOL viewed the Internet at large as a wildly chaotic resource that they needed to tame and manicure behind its walled garden. To some extent, AOL treated the Internet as a subset of its proprietary service, positioning itself as the gatekeeper to what they deemed valuable and worthy. This is precisely the way traditional media (especially Hollywood) views social media today.

But just as the Internet was not a subset of AOL, social media will not become a subset of traditional media. In fact, social media will increasingly begin to compete directly with traditional media consumption. Yes, it is true that the media output produced and distributed by the audience itself will generally be of lower production value and quality. Even so, they will prove highly competitive to Hollywood products, as the personal engagement factor inherent in personal media outweighs any loss of production value.

So given the competitive nature of social media and the operational challenges it represents, why should media companies even think of embracing social integration? Because they have no choice… social media will continue to take market share away from traditional media, regardless of whether the media companies participate or not.

And if that’s the case, it’s better to eat your own children… otherwise, Google and Yahoo will gladly oblige. At the end of the day, the media conglomerates should view social media much like they did the rise of cable TV. Cable eventually took half the market away from traditional broadcast TV, so the media conglomerates vertically and horizontally integrated their way into cable in order to buy back market share. They should do the same with social media by pursuing a strategy of social integration. Rupert Murdoch already made his first move, and it looks like NBC is about to take their first baby steps. Welcome to the new world of socially-integrated media empires! Robert Young is a serial entrepreneur who played a major role in the invention & commercialization of the world’s first consumer ISP, Internet advertising (pay-per-click ads), free email, and digital media superdistribution.

Written by Robert Young on July 11th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on MySpace and Social Networks and YouTube.

You Tube vs Yahoo

Earlier this week, Yahoo announced a revamped video hosting service. Many saw it as a threat to You Tube (which has issues of its own.) In reality, Yahoo! has its work cut out. I checked with folks over at Hitwise, a traffic analysis and research firm, and they sent me data which shows that You Tube is miles ahead of their competition, including Yahoo! Video.

For instance, YouTube’s market share of Internet visits has increased 110% over the past three months (week ending May 27 versus week ending March 4, 2006). Yahoo! Video has increased its market share of visits 22% for that same time period. You Tube has higher usage metrics as well. For April 2006, YouTube’s average session time for that month was 15 minutes 33 seconds. Yahoo! Video’s average session time was 15 minutes 13 seconds.

In April 2005, Yahoo! Video’s average session time was 10 minutes 29 seconds and YouTube was not up yet. And just for kicks, for the week ending May 27, 2006, YouTube was the #43 ranked website among all websites, while Yahoo! Video was ranked #205 among all websites.

Written by Om Malik on June 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Google stock continues to impress

According to the wires, Google is reporting a 70 percent year-over-year increase in revenue of $2.69 billion in its third quarter 2006 fiscal results, which ended Sept. 30. The Internet search engine also announced a non-GAAP operating income of $1.03 billion, a net income of $812 million and earnings per share of $2.62. While these earnings are not reflective of Google's recent acquisition of YouTube, they do indicate Google's partnerships with eBay, Fox Interactive Media and Intuit. According to Reuters, they also posted a 92% jump in quarterly profit.

Didn't I read Yahoo's 3rd quarter earnings were down ~40%? Google and Yahoo! seem to be headed in opposite directions. Internet Outsider has some interesting thoughts on these two competitors.

This is both good and bad for the industry. It's good for the industry if Google continues to dominate Internet search because you can spend 85-90% of your advertising revenue with Google since the vast majority of people use Google to search. Any webmaster worth his/her salt knows this simply by looking at the webserver's referral logs. If the market is fragmented, then businesses have to spend advertising dollars in multiple places, and certainly won't get the same return on investment (ROI), resulting in higher marketing costs and lower profitability.

On the other hand, having Google dominate Internet search is bad, because then they can set the agenda, they can do what they want, and they can set the prices they want and how much of a "cut" they take on Google Adsense/Adwords search advertisements. The beauty of capitalism is when it's a free market with many companies competing. Look at AT&T in the telecom world before they were broken up. Once an industry becomes a monolithic -- as did the telecom sector up until the 1990s -- then the market stagnates, innovation ceases, and price/competiton becomes nill. Breaking up Ma Bell helped spark more innovation, more competition, and lower prices for consumers.

Similarly, Google's "do not evil" manta is all fine and dandy, but should we trust them to avoid the Dark Side? Why hasn't Google earned the ire that Microsoft has? Maybe it's because Google has enabled businesses, entrepreneurs, and even home-based businesses to make money off of Google. I guess we're willing to look the other way as long as we get our Google Adsense check in the mail.

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Tags: google, internet, search, stock, yahoo, youtube
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Written by VoIP & Gadgets Blog on January 1st, 1970 with no comments.
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