Can you even begin to believe this? 2 young buggers like you and me go to a dinner party in SFO, shoot a video and want to share that with friends. They try sending email but it just keeps bouncing back. They try to upload it on the Net, but it is too much of a hassle. What would you and I do? Just say, fuck it, not worth the damn effort. What did these guys do? Go into their garage (probably the garage does the trick!!! - did too with HP, Google etc) - and came up with a simple technical/user-driven solution called You Tube. If you don't know what they heck You Tube is, you must be living under a rock or something. They built an easy-to-upload and use video sharing site, and brilliantly, developed the concept of community around it. People could share videos, comment on it, blog about it, swap it around etc. Suddenly, in America and rest of the broadband-driven world, people started watching and sharing TV soap clips, porn, sports clips, porn, funny home videos, porn at their convenience - not when the big networks wanted them to watch. How cool - but since all of this was for free, what next? Businessweek asked this question a few months back, and concluded the article, well, without a serious conclusion. How could they monetise this please?
Well, they did, and how! None other than big daddy Google paid a fuckintastic, unbelievable, crazy 1.6 billion $ (yes, with a b, not a m) for this! The damn founders are bloody 29 and 27 still! The rest of the world is shaking heads with disbelief. This cannot be true.
Take a look at these buggers - the founders who suddenly are richer by atleast 200 mill $ each! Appropriately, in a you Tube video. That could so easily be you, me, or the class back bencher from your school/college. No one can be so damn smart/lucky - whichever way you look at it!
So how will Google recover that money? It is a lot of money by even Google's standards. Obviously their strategy is to monetize the millions of visitors' eyeballs with the video version of Adwords. How it will pan out is a billion $ question. It is one thing to have unobtrusive text ads, quite another to put video ads on a home video of 3 chicks dancing the Ho Dance in Chelsea! And what about copyright problems? A huge % of videos are in clear copyright violation - but hey, that is the Net isin't it? Interesting, very interesting.
By the way, one of the founders (Steve Hurley) is a design guy - logos and stuff (did the design for Paypal), and the other dude (Chan) is a techie geek - comp. science etc. No MBA, no nothing. Just an idea, the guts to do it, and the vision to expand the horizons, the right environment (Silicon Valley, the VC network, the concepts etc) and sheer luck. Wonderful stuff!
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