Monday, October 16, 2006
Is YouTube really worth $1.65B
The Google guys went and bought YouTube for $1.65B and I gotta wonder what they were thinking.
A googol is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Search got them that 1, will everything else hereafter be a whole bunch of zeroes? In the 90s the web boom was driven by "net business" with things like Amazon and eBay surviving the bust on their merits while ePets disappeared like a sock puppet in the dryer. The second web boom is driven by "net media" phenomena such as blogging, video and image sharing and social networking. There are more eyeballs with broadband connections and online marketting has had its rennessaince with Google leading the way.
The problem with the new media fads is that they only have value based in their popularity. Popularity is transient. There have been fads on the internet before. Google should know better than to pay a premium for control of a fad, especially in the post-apocalypse of the net-boom.
A googol is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Search got them that 1, will everything else hereafter be a whole bunch of zeroes? In the 90s the web boom was driven by "net business" with things like Amazon and eBay surviving the bust on their merits while ePets disappeared like a sock puppet in the dryer. The second web boom is driven by "net media" phenomena such as blogging, video and image sharing and social networking. There are more eyeballs with broadband connections and online marketting has had its rennessaince with Google leading the way.
The problem with the new media fads is that they only have value based in their popularity. Popularity is transient. There have been fads on the internet before. Google should know better than to pay a premium for control of a fad, especially in the post-apocalypse of the net-boom.
