The fight for internet video sharing supremacy is a weird one. It’s one of those things that’s ridiculously expensive to maintain, is not profitable, but yet necessary. More on that in a moment.
Veoh, a video sharing site most of you probably forgot about until I just mentioned it, is going under. They gave it the good fight, but never seemed to catch on with the masses. If you ever wanted to know how to spend 70 million dollars on something that didn’t work, look no further than Veoh.
YouTube, a Google property, is a name everybody knows and is continuing to offer new features. One such new feature is Speed Dashboard. This is actually a very good and useful utility because it shows how fast (or slow) YouTube video travels through the internet via your ISP compared to others. If you periodically encounter slowdowns while using the YouTube site (and it does happen often), a quick jump to the Speed Dashboard will quickly tell you how well your ISP fares out on the YouTube site.
YouTube has been in the same fiscal predicament all the other video sharing sites are in. They have not made so much as a dime and continue to lose money every moment the site is online. Were it not for Google’s large corporate status, YouTube would have gone under years ago.
Why is it that Google continues to support YouTube even though it’s losing money hand over fist? It’s because it (hopefully) will make the big G some money someday. People do rely on YouTube as a valuable search tool, and sometimes use it just as much as Google itself. And the business model for YouTube has seen a few major changes both in partner programs and in the interface itself. Google believes the YouTube product holds enough value to stick around.
Do you think YouTube – or any video sharing site for that matter – has any chance of ever making money? Let us know by writing a comment or two.
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No wonder this is the first I had heard of them.
I think its certainly possible for them to turn a profit on YouTube one day. I would not put it past Google who are the masters at internet advertising.
I don’t see it, but perhaps some technology will come along to make hosting the videos cheaper. More likely, though, it seems someone will somehow come along with some better way of doing videos and will replace youtube altogether as the new “money pit”.
Nope never heard of Veoh. I’m surprised they haven’t figured out how to make YouTube profitable. It’s such an essential search tool these days. In my college classes I take it’s where my professors get videos to show. It’s almost an extension of Google Search.
Never heard of veoh before now.
I think web video will possibly become a tech dead-end unless it makes a wholesale jump to smartphones and PDAs. The prpblem is that there is no clear way to monetize what web video offers. I do think that smaller operators should do better as the expense of hosting web video comes down. I had been on Veoh’s site before. I hope someone can buy them.
I find it incredible that Google, the ad powerhouse, cannot make money on ads to keep youtube afloat, or even making money.
This is too bad. I still watch old TV show episodes that can be found on Veoh, whereas youtube only has clips.
Another free TV site down. : (
The news of Veoh shutting down really makes me sad. I spent a lot of time on there the last few years and I made a lot of good friends, some of which I’d like to have for the rest of my life. I saw this article when it was first posted and have tried to take the last few weeks giving most everyone other ways to keep in touch with me. So I’m really thankful that you wrote this article, otherwise I wouldn’t have known until it was probably too late to do that.
To a lesser extent, Veoh shutting down hurts the anime community because it was the best place to watch anime. Megavideo is the second most common place anime seems to be hosted, but it can be annoying to deal with due to time limits of how much you can watch and the fact that the quality of videos aren’t allows there.
I liked Veoh, but it almost never had the right episodes of shows I was looking for. I mostly use Sidereel, Blinkx, Hulu, and NinjaVideo.net.