Posts for Ticker ‘YouTube’

Disney joins forces with YouTube (DIS, GOOG)

Walt Disney Co.  (NYSE: DIS) is joining forces with Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) YouTube video-sharing site.

Under the terms of the deal,  YouTube will offer clips from Disney’s ESPN and ABC networks. The ESPN channel will launch mid-April and the ABC in mid-May, according to paidContent.org, which first reported the story.

The agreement is clearly a win for YouTube, which despite generating about $500 million in revenue is not profitable.  The Wall Street Journal notes that Disney will share the revenue with YouTube from ads sold against its content. It will also test preroll ads and feature ESPN’s video player on its channel.

One downside from Google is that Disney is hedging its bets.  The media company is holding talks with Hulu, a rival video site backed by General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) among others about broadcasting ABC shows.  ESPN is not part of those discussions.

YouTube and Disney had held discussions about showing full-length ABC episodes on the video site but the talks went nowhere, according to the Journal.

Posted on: March 31, 2009 – 5:13 am in Entertainment, Media, Uncategorized, , ,

Google (GOOG): The Failure Of YouTube

By Google’s (GOOG) standards, YouTube was not a terribly expensive acquisition. The search company’s market cap is about $170 billion. It paid less than 1% of that for the world’s largest video site.

But, sometimes no matter how cheap something is, the price comes too high.

According to The New York Post, "YouTube’s numbers for 2008 don’t look pretty: while 3 billion videos are viewed every month, revenues could total an anemic sub-$200 million this year ."

There are a lot of theories about why YouTube does not work as a commercial enterprise. One is that the videos are too short. Another one is that they are too hard to search and put into categories.

But, none of those get to the heart of the problem. The quality of most of the clips is simply too poor for major advertisers to find compelling.

Who wants to put an ad that took $5 million to product next to a video made from a cellphone, no matter how many people watch it? A hard sell for companies used to seeing their ads on HD TV

Douglas A. McIntyre

Posted on: July 6, 2008 – 5:34 am in Mergers and Buy Outs, ,

The Death Of Web 2.0: A Business Without Money

MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube are among the most visited websites in the world. Unfortunately, no one can figure out how to make money from them. According to comScore, Facebook, the smallest of the three, had 35.7 million unique visitors in the US last month.

No matter their colossal size, these internet properties bring in very little revenue and probably make very little money. Facebook was given a valuation of $15 billion last year. That may no longer be more than a pipe dream. Rupert Murdoch at News Corp (NWS) says that MySpace is missing its revenue targets. Its sales are under $1 billion, no match for old-line portals like AOL and Yahoo! (YHOO).

According to the FT "The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media” sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers."

Google has no trouble telling its shareholders that any real money from its video site, YouTube, is well in the future. And, YouTube has the largest share of the online video market. But, much of the content posted there is of poor quality and hard to put into categories. Why would marketers want to be side-by-side with crap?

At large social network sites, finding the common bonds among the tens of millions of people who keep personal pages has been difficult. That makes targeting advertising almost impossible. There is also a concern that people who spend a lot of time at MySpace and YouTube are shut-ins with low household incomes.

Digg.com, Sphere, Newsvine, Del.icio.us. Dead as doornails.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Posted on: May 27, 2008 – 4:48 am in Internet, , , , , , , ,

Is Facebook Worth More to Microsoft Than Others? (MSFT, GOOG, YHOO)

The WSJ (wsj.com) (subscription required for full access) has reported that Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) may be making an investment into Facebook that would supposedly value Facebook at $10 Billion.  That doesn’t mean this is a $10 Billion buyout nor that $10 Billion is what Microsoft will pony up for the company.  Google is also reported as being interested, althogh this situation has been covered from almost every single angle out there in recent months.

But it would put a substantial valuation on this social networking site.  After the success of News Corp’s (NYSE:NWS) MySpace and after the ramp of Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) YouTube, everyone has catching up to do.  The space is not wide open, but it isn’t yet closed.

Jon C. Ogg
September 24, 2007

Posted on: September 24, 2007 – 1:59 pm in Internet, , , , , ,