Mar 13 2008
Not only does Google want advertisers to upload their entire budget to the Google system, they now want publishers to do the same with their ad inventory.
*Apologies for yet another GOOG post, but it seems like every big development in media involves them, Apple, or both.
Mar 12 2008
Google wants to host every video on the web, and it’s willing to front the cost for that right: The barriers to video publishing are crumbling.
Google is giving developers access to the YouTube infrastructure. You’ll be able to combine the benefits of YouTube (free hosting, large distribution) with the advantages of maintaining a standalone site (retaining the user, the ability to serve ads).
This eliminates bandwidth costs and provides a compelling motive to build on the YouTube platform.
But there’s a catch. Google gets your video. It gets to monetize your channel page on YouTube and it gets to index your video (on YouTube) through its search results. What do you think will rank first, a video on mighty YouTube, or the same video on its creator’s site?
A conflict of interest is created when the company that indexes and ranks the web also owns a massive amount of the content in that index.
Regardless, the economic incentives to publishers are too big to resist. Bandwidth is a major cost for video sites and going through YouTube will drastically increase margins.
Look for major media companies and startup video sites to make deals with YouTube and for professionally driven content to explode on the web.
All under Google’s control. This is good for entrepreneurs and for the web, but it puts Google in a frightening position: with a stranglehold on both search and video.
This might not equal the magic cash machine of paid search, but it’s going to be huge.
