Seriously? People are still citing that hack-job of an analysis? It didn't even take peering into account - it was ridiculous.
Some common examples include Windows having a lower TCO than Linux, Theora being better than H.264, and of course practically anything in the realm of politics.
Unlike traditional journalists (though clearly not the NYT!) these guys don't have black books of knowledgable people to call up and ask on a certain issue.
Social media makes everyone's opinions and views a lot more equal (when really they shouldn't be) and these stories eventually bubble up to traditional media, which have the view that since the whole "blogosphere" is talking about it as fact; it must be fact.
it is just part of a bigger strategy - text search, book search, audio/video search etc.
youtube is a long term investment. as long as G has money to keep it running/improving, they have nothing to worry about.
may be 5-10 years from now, the same ppl would say that the best investment that google made, is youtube.
OK, so we've got Heroes season 2. Now we have the problem: do people want to pay money for it? Answer: well, no, not if they can get it free on Youtube. Piracy is Youtube's killer app. Unlike the iPod (piracy is the iPod's killer app, too, unless you think 20-somethings are filling 8 GB iPods at $1 a song), Youtube doesn't have plausible deniability or a convenient way to extract money from the pirates.
"Even so, it’s important to remember that Google paid for YouTube in stock, not cash, that represented a tiny fraction of the company’s total market capitalization. (The deal was initially valued at $1.65 billion.) And immediately after the merger was announced, Google’s shares rose, which in some sense seemed to pay for the deal on its own."
much better to just miss breaking even. Shovel all the user data into doubleclick, and all the video data into crazy data mining algorithms.
I can almost picture Steve Ballmer slapping his cheeks with a mocking "Oh, no! Google's dominating yet another money-sucking cost pit! Whatever shall we do?!?!" before bursting out in laughter.
-At Google Search, you do a search and get a text ad. Each text ad is about 400 bytes, each search page (with your results) is around 5k. Serving up the webpage is done from another site.
-At Google YouTube, you do a video search and get a text ad alongside it. Each text ad is 400 bytes, each search result you look at (eg, video) is about 2MB.
So, are you going to make as much, after paying for bandwidth, with a factor of 400 (2,000,000 / 5000) difference in bandwidth?