Google/Youtube problems

Mon Nov 19 18:41:29 UTC 2012

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 6:30 AM, Leo Bicknell <bicknell at ufp.org> wrote:

> In a message written on Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 03:59:22PM +0200, Saku Ytti
> wrote:
> > What I'm trying to say, I can't see youtube generating anywhere nearly
> > enough revenue who shift 10% (or more) of Internet. And to explain this
> > conundrum to myself, I've speculated accounting magic (which I'd frown
> > upon) and leveraging market position to get free capacity (which is ok,
> I'd
> > do the same, had I the leverage)
>
> I suspect you're thinking about revenue in terms of say, the
> advertisements they run with the videos.  I beleive you're right, that
> would never pay the bills.
>
> Consider a different model.  Google checks out your gmail account, and
> discovers you really like Red Bull and from your YouTube profile knows
> you watch a lot of Ke$ha videos.  It also discovers there are a lot more
> folks with the same profile.  They can now sell that data to a marketing
> firm, that there is a strong link between energy drinks and Ke$ha
> videos.
>

Actually GOOG doesn't allow this as policy.  Different BUs are rather quite
restricted on how they can obtain other BUs data.  In general "if you can't
do it as XYZ corp, you can't do it from inside of GOOG either" -- there's a
sort of privacy/policy watchdog group inside of the puzzle palace with at
least a few people who are *very* concerned with privacy and data
protection.  I know this just because I've met a handful of them over the
years.  The ones in the group charged with making sure your data isn't
opened up to everyone and their brother, even inside of google, to this
sort of thing are pretty fanatical too.  Ads can't use any data in any
other way than anyone else could from GMail.  Same goes with search.  They
can (and clearly do) share technology, software, infrastructure, and
methodologies, but, the actual data is a pretty touchy subject between BUs
due to their own policy.  Even if they disband the group, everyone I've
ever met with any responsibility towards user data shared the attitude that
doing something many of us would consider "icky" would be somethign they'd
block against internally.   (such as just opening up the gmail to any
advertiser that came along, aggregating data between BUs to sell individual
preferences, etc)

Will this be the case forever?  Dunno.  The ethos/culture is what keeps all
this in check right now and culture is known to change.  All that said,
they're quite profitable now, and so I don't know that there's a pressure
from profit motive to improve that revenue stream by doing dirty pool.
 Especially if the world governments decide they're playing dirty pool and
go looking.

>
> GOOG-411 - building a corpus of voice data for Android's voice
> recognition.
>
> ReCaptcha - improving visual recognition for their book scanning
> process.
>
> Most of the "free" services are simply the cheapest way to get the data
> needed for some other service that can make much more money.  It may
> seem weird to write off all the costs of YouTube as data aquisition
> costs, but there's far more money to be made selling marketing data than
> ads against streaming videos...
>