Of YouTube and Legal Evergreen Content
Posted by Mike Bijon March 25, 2007
In Evergreen Content, YouTube, and Money, Fred Wilson suggests:
It got me thinking about this kind of evergreen content that keeps getting viewed day after day, week after week. What’s that worth? To me, to YouTube, to the band?
Let’s start with YouTube. Let’s say they do implement the 3 second pre-roll and let’s say they charge a $2 cpm for a three second pre-roll. Then my Bukowski video could earn YouTube about $15 per year. And I might get 60 percent of that, or close to $10/year.
I don’t agree that YouTube should implement pre-rolls and I think they already have a payment plan in the works for submitters, but why isn’t YouTube, or a competitor, licensing professional concert video from bands or their labels?
Not only would this provide the premium content that YouTube will need to compete with the coming wave of content from TV and film production companies, but would also help to assuage some of the feelings that YouTube’s business is heavily rooted in copyright abuse. Yes, it leaves “fans” out of the equation but at least the content would be high-quality, legal, and video cameras in the next seat wouldn’t impinge on concertgoers the way mobile phones do in elevators and restaurants.
…as for the fact that YouTube might need to add pre-roll ads to support this - they don’t. I don’t know where most people are buying their bandwidth (or if they’ve actually checked recent bandwidth prices), but recent calculations of YouTube’s costs are inflating bandwidth prices. Currently running just a few dedicated servers for a client gets bandwidth down to $0.18/GB. Even Akamai bandwidth is less than $0.50/GB for a company I’ve worked with that’s ranked around 10,000th on Alexa. I suspect Google is paying less than $0.10/GB for purchased bandwidth and less than $0.05/GB for bandwidth they’ve shifted to their own fiber.
Mike Bijon: I'm a development manager and technologist for a smart, small marketing strategy company, 
