Why YouTube Could Make Things Difficult For Google

from the keep-your-friends-close... dept

In all the hysteria over Google's purchase of YouTube, one angle that's gone largely unexplored are the implications of the buy for Google's advertising business. The common thought is that YouTube now gives Google plenty more page views to sell ads, as well as a huge audience to show video ads, but it's also possible that the YouTube buy could actually hurt Google's advertising business by alienating external sites with which it has advertising deals. News Corp. is already reportedly seeking some sort of reassurances from Google over the potential conflicts of interest the YouTube buy could create, in light of its $900 million deal for Google to sell and serve ads on MySpace. As Google expands its media empire, this sort of problem will become more prevalent: companies may be happy to partner with Google because it can help them monetize its content, but are likely to grow uneasy when Google comes into a space and becomes a competitor, too. Perhaps this is one reason why Google's not really done much to build up Orkut lately: it doesn't want to alienate itself from more popular external social-networking sites that offer it a more immediate and lucrative return through ad deals. Google's popularity and power already causes it problems with people who see it as somehow unfairly profiting from its work. The same type of conflicts from its advertising-partners-cum-competitors seems inevitable.
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  • identicon
    Sohrab, 16 Oct 2006 @ 4:06pm

    hhmm that is indeed an interesting idea. While they want to grow, they do still make lots of money from Advertisment and they can both for example Deal with Fox yet bring on a true competitor to Myspace

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 16 Oct 2006 @ 4:09pm

    poor google, not knowing which choice will most efficiently make the next pile of millions. A real charity case.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    william, 16 Oct 2006 @ 4:33pm

    google is great

    They are just looking for some other profitable venture. They only have the ads and search engine biz. everything else is a money pit.

    Google search and Gmail are great services but YouTube doesn't seem to fit with their other businesses. I kind of wonder where they are going with this and if they will be able to make a profit form it after paying for the bandwidth. But I'm sure they are a lot smarter than me and will think of something.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    MEoip, 16 Oct 2006 @ 4:37pm

    Office

    Youtube will find an eventual place within the docs.google.com. Why have a plan picture for a report when you can have a little video clip. Why not link videos to google earth. Eventually google will weave their web of projects together to form a multimedia driven platform that is simple to use.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    |333173|3|_||3, 16 Oct 2006 @ 11:28pm

    G Video

    I'll be very surprised if YouTube is not combined with Google video soon, with Google branding instead of YouTube's, and in the end, it will be as MEoip said, all of Google's businesses fully integrated.

    If google keep on buying, they should be in a good position. the only problem I see is that I won't have any chance with my own advertising business if I ever set one up, so I'll just have to start off with Thor (a Game with a fancy Physics engine where the Physics actually are usefull like killing people by falling debris), and VoIPER, an idea for a phone service. Ah well

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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