We’ve recently been playing with video blogging more. Darren has done several in the past weeks and I’ve got a couple buried around too. The most popular video hosting service around, YouTube, has come under fire recently for performance and availability reasons. It’s a big service. They have done a reasonable job, in my opinion, of scaling well with astronomical growth. Truth is, serving up video is a massive undertaking, especially on that scale. I don’t really fault YouTube for having growing pains. AOL did back in the mid-90s when they made the bold move of offering, wait for it… unliited dialup. MySpace seems to experience “glitches” regularly. It seems natural for a growing service to hit some bumps.
This graph was posted on the Qumana blog today (originally from Read/Write Web) charting Yahoo Video (Green), Google Video (Blue) and YouTube (Red) visitors.
My question is how much more can YouTube grow without self-imploding.
YouTube will do fine when they get mainstream advertisers to add short (5 seconds max) ads.
Good advertising income means having the ability to locate caching/redundant servers in various regions to speed up performance.
They’re on the cusp of something huge. Don’t be surprised if YouTube adds a Media Center plug-in and finds other ways to bring their content straight to the home entertainment screen (set top box a la Akimbo, MCE/Myth plug-in, Tivo hack, etc).
Yahoo had a video site? What? :)
I think youtube has done a pretty good job considering how much bandwidth it take to stream video in such massive amounts. I think that a lot of their success has to do with the same community that is making myspace grow so rapidly.
I’m seeing a lot more spammed URLs in the comments sections. I think Youtube is having growing pains.
They should be able to keep scaling. I was talking to some people at http://www.rackspace.com. YouTube has over 100 servers there and it’s not their only hosting company.
RackSpace is typically $500/$1,000 per month per server. So you can see the tremendous outpouring of money it takes for such an operation.
– Bryan
http://www.BryanCFleming.com
I think the key question to ask is how does YouTube become profitable and when. They’re losing staggering amount of money in bandwidth and hosting. And without question their current ad-supported model isn’t working. To all advertisers (other than those focused on brand exposure) YouTube is not presenting a valued proposition. What do they need to do? Become an affiliate? Paid model? Syndicate their content to partners? No one has found the answer for this yet.
[…] YouTube’s exponential growth (ProBlogger). […]
Just a note that I was the original source of the chart you’re using:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/youtube_nearly.php
The attribution got lost along the way to your post ;-)
Right on Richard. I’ll make that attribution note. You should mentioin that to Qumana too. :)
Darren McLaughlin,
>> I’m seeing a lot more spammed URLs in the comments sections. I think Youtube is having growing pains.
It’s making everyone mad including me, especially the ones for the “take a survey” web site. In fact, I made a spoof video about it on YouTube called “YouTube Comment Spam”. It’s a parody of the song “Secret Agent Man”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBvkLHaOoRQ
I think YouTube will tackle these issues soon enough; right now they’re probably going nuts just managing the massive traffic they have.
Robert
Robert,
Thanks for the 2.5 minutes of hilarity :) Song parodies have always been a favorite of mine.
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nice i thought that yahoo was the best… now im gonna go to you tube.. jeje thnx man
YouTube is the Product to all this accelarating technology. I really believe they will have a solution very soon. For example :
I am an independent producer that for the past year and a half has being executing the Biggest Innovation in TV Marketing.
(Read More About it Here) http://soulstation.tv/soulstation/article.php?story=20060627172130646
The Online Reality Show I am executing at the moment has to do about “HOW” I could get rid of Commercials for TV and solely get Funded on Product Placement. This might sound a bit weird since the reality about Programing is that without Commercials is not Possible. But the Real Reality behind this is that I am just an answer to all the Brands Nightmares since TiVo touched the market.
Getting back to the subject, YouTube is in the Middle of this Techonological Contreversy that very soon they will need to answer to. The answer for YouTube is to make the steps necessary to invite and promote Non-Commercial Independent Producers, as myself, that are already funded by Brands to give out this High Quality Productions for Free..and if they make the investment in technology to compete with TV Quality I guarantee they will be around for a long time.
So when you see “Soul Station TV” on your DishNetwork or Local TV Channel remember you read this here and it directed you to
here : http://soulstation.tv/soulstation/