I wrote a few weeks ago a post about just how massive the site is. I listened to a good interview with Jason Calcanis recently where he shared his experiences working with them as a potential partner.
The short of it is that YouTube has not been at all interested in accommodating any partners because of their size and scale. One thing that i found interesting in this talk was just how powerful the future of YouTube is. Some interesting points:
- Cash. They have an amazing amount of cash at $50 billion (Forbes)
- Nobody’s in charge. Google is great at this in general. It is very hard to identify who is setting the direction and strategy for each group and the company as a whole. Because of this, they can’t be critiqued for lack of execution or for being evil.
- Avoiding Anti-Trust. They can’t buy any large players due to the fear that the government would block it for anti-competition reasons.
- They are copying competitor’s strategies. These competitors are getting lots of video channels around a niche and selling ads around it. YouTube is now doing just that and will probably do more.
The cool part of this is that YouTube could have bought Netflix or something similar. Thus, they are just going to buy lots and lots of content and put it out for free. My prediction is that You’ll see NFL and other sports content available there along with full tv shows – and it’ll be SWEET for all of us.