{"id":974,"date":"2015-10-03T21:25:21","date_gmt":"2015-10-04T01:25:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/youtube-1-every-other-video-sharing-site-0\/"},"modified":"2015-10-04T17:12:04","modified_gmt":"2015-10-04T21:12:04","slug":"youtube-1-everyone-else-0","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/youtube-1-everyone-else-0\/","title":{"rendered":"YouTube 1, everyone else 0"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWith every user added and video uploaded, the whole network becomes more valuable to all.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Let’s face it… YouTube is killing the game right now. Over 1 billion users (that’s close to a third of the world’s internet users). 300 hours of content uploaded every minute. That’s 5 hours uploaded every\u00a0second<\/em>. And all over the world, in the 70 countries with local\u00a0YouTube sites and others, users are watching over 2,300 hours of video every\u00a0second<\/em>. Insane. So, how does it\u00a0all work?<\/p>\n

Becoming the Go-to Destination for Online Videos<\/strong><\/p>\n

YouTube was founded in early 2005, hosting only the now-famous video of one of the founders at the zoo. In 2006, YouTube began to prove its staying power, attracting 20 million users per month, 65,000 new videos per day and 100 million views per day. The more videos that were uploaded, the more people flocked to sign up and see what all the hype was all about. The more people that signed up and viewed and liked and shared, the more users uploaded videos. It\u2019s a virtuous cycle and direct network effects at its finest. Or, if you want to segment content creators and content consumers into separate buckets, you could also argue that it was indirect network effects that fueled YouTube\u2019s early growth. Either way, this thing was growing so fast (YouTube was the world\u2019s 5th<\/sup> most popular website<\/a> in 2006) that Google couldn\u2019t resist purchasing it for $1.65B in stock. The only problem was, YouTube wasn\u2019t making any money yet \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n

Money In, Money Out<\/strong><\/p>\n

When the product\u2019s free, they say the users become the product. \u201cThey\u201d were right. To monetize all of those users, YouTube began showing ads<\/a> during its videos in August 2007. To my YouTube faithful, those were the good ol\u2019 days of transparent banner ads on the bottom of your video that could be \u201cx\u2019ed\u201d out of. Good times. Nevertheless, the ad revenue drove YouTube into the black and made the site the go-to destination for social media savvy marketers. The more users and videos that YouTube had, the more advertising partners wanted a piece of the action. These indirect network effects created value for the marketers for sure and allowed YouTube to capture the value being created by its creative content producers. In some sense, the users benefited as well since the additional cash flow allowed YouTube to reinvest in its platform. Soon, the top YouTube video producers were making so much ad money for YouTube that the company had to give the content creators a slice of the pie. YouTube has paid YouTube \u201cchannel partners\u201d hundreds of millions of dollars through its 45\/55 ad revenue sharing program. Can you get rich on YouTube? Maybe. Go ahead and sign up, feed the machine, and find out.<\/p>\n

Squeezing the Lemon<\/strong><\/p>\n

So\u2026 can ad revenue last forever? Can advertising partners feed the beast in perpetuity? Eh, probably. YouTube is the best darn video sharing website out there, with over half of the market. They can do whatever they want at this point (as we learned in the DIGIT platform strategy simulation). But YouTube knows that their ads have gotten a bit obnoxious. They must hear the feedback. That\u2019s the problem with having a large user base\u2026 you don\u2019t want them all pissed off. So, to appease the users that hate ads and would pay to have them eliminated, YouTube is rumored to introduce a premium, ad-free version of the site soon. After all, Pandora is doing it. Spotify and Apple Music and Tidal are doing it. YouTube\u2019s most popular search term is \u201cmusic.\u201d It would make sense that they would start behaving like a music content provider, right? My question is, what does this do to the user base? Do the network effects continue? Would you pay to kill ads? How much would you pay?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

YouTube is the master of both direct and indirect network effects. 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