Neil Arun didn’t want to miss a rare but risky opportunity to embed with an Iraqi police unit, hunting members of al Qaeda. But his employers -- responsible for Neil’s security -- weren’t happy. This film by Richard Pendry nvestigates how a frontline journalist balances risk and reward.
So just why are thousands of people unable to download YouTube videos? To understand the politics of YouTube, you have to understand the economics of YouTube.
YouTube is one of the planet's most popular websites. It ranks fourth according to Alexa (the top three are Google, Yahoo & Facebook). So how much profit do you think this hugely successful website makes? $100 million a year? $50 million? or $10 million?
Actually it's none of these. Believe it or not, YouTube doesn't make any profit at all. It loses money.
No-one knows how much it loses (Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion, won't tell anyone) but a recent report by Credit Suisse predicts YouTube will lose $470.6 million this year (how did they work out the "point six"?).
Google's Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette says the site won't be loss making for ever, "What we can tell you is that we're really pleased with the trajectory of YouTube" he told the press, "And we're really pleased with its revenue growth. In the not too distant future, we see a very profitable business for it."
The costs associated with running YouTube (vast video hosting servers, very fat pipes to distribute video globally etc) are massive. So just how is YouTube planning to cover its costs and make a profit? In other words; how is YouTube planning to monetize its huge video library?
Recently YouTube announced that it's now monetizing at least 12% of all videos streamed in the United States — a huge jump over the numbers that had previously been reported. It does this by placing paid advertising alongside video content. 12% equates to something like 800 million monetized video views per month(that's a lot of monetizing).
In January 2009 YouTube also started a pilot scheme to charge users 99 cents to download and keep (as opposed to merely viewing) a video. This was an experiment to mimic the iTunes business model. To help make this strategy effective, YouTube has tinkered with the code on its site to try to disable or block some of the many free downloader tools which are available on the internet (see previous posts).
It's a game of cat and mouse; the free downloaders have simply re-written their code to get around the barriers.
So what happens next?
Well two weeks ago YouTube spent $106.5 million buying a company called On2 Technologies. On2's VP6 codec is licensed by Adobe, for its Flash Player and Flash Lite 3 for mobile phones.
Flash is the technology that drives YouTube. Flash is the technology that makes YouTube's heart beat. it's also the technology that drives all those free download tools.
So what will happen when YouTube's engineers control the heart beat?
Watch this space!
Graham Majin is Head of Video Marketing and Video Production at Kent Video Production Company Kersh Media KWIKVID http://www.kershmedia.co.uk http://www.kwikvid.com
