Like Google and TiVo,YouTube Is Now a Verb, And an Adjective
How much should it cost to buy the rights to an up-and-coming verb? By Google's estimating when it bought YouTube last week, about $1.6 billion.
Google itself is one of those few companies whose marketplace success is so complete that its name becomes an acceptable synonym for its product. Around the world, Internet users don't search for information, they Google it.
That's close to the situation in which YouTube now finds itself. It's already the mandatory first stop when something happens in the world and you want to see what it might have looked like on TV. It's becoming an adjective, too; this midterm campaign is being called the first "YouTube election" because of the videos that politicians are posting of their opponents' less felicitous moments: using insulting racial terms or falling asleep at important hearings.
Its final triumph as a verb can't be far behind.
Considering the potential of YouTube, Google probably couldn't afford not to buy it. For a company of Google's market capitalization -- $130 billion -- the purchase price, while not exactly immaterial, is the sort of roll of the dice a company like Google needs to take, if only to avoid the equally risky prospect of not taking enough risks.
Consider the upside. Recently, needing to catch up on television coverage of the recent IM-mediated scandal on Capitol Hill, I did what millions of Americans do and tuned in to "The Daily Show." But I YouTubed it, going to the site and searching for "Daily Show and Foley." Thus was I able to catch up on the program's take on the affair, which it calls "The Crisis in America's Pants."
Only as an afterthought did it occur to me that I might be able to see the same clips on the Web site of the "Daily Show" itself. It turned out I could, but the site was slower and froze up on me a couple of times.
To cite another company whose brand became a word, YouTube is in the position of becoming the TiVo to the whole world. Who wouldn't pay $1.6 billion for that?
One of the things that could keep YouTube from achieving that potential is for content owners to decide they don't want intermediaries between themselves and their viewers. Already, media companies like Viacom -- owner of Comedy Central and more -- are thumping their chests about the legal action they plan on taking against YouTube for all of the infringing material on the site, like the Jon Stewart clips I saw. Most people think the endgame these media companies have in mind is a licensing deal in which YouTube pays them for the right to use their clips, a step YouTube has made clear it would be only too happy to take.
A better long-term approach for media companies might be to get their viewers out of the recently acquired habit of going to a third party, like YouTube, for their entertainment. Instead, viewers like me should have as their first impulse to check the show's Web site, where our visit can be monetized via advertising just as though we had watched the program on "real" TV.
Getting viewers into that habit means taking video streaming more seriously than many media companies now seem to. YouTube walked the walk with Web videos, spending a considerable amount of time and money on servers and bandwidth to quickly show users their requested videos, though the quality of the image still left much to be desired. By contrast, the video on the Web sites for many media companies seems to be just a pretty ornament that doesn't function particularly well, because the media companies don't seem to have the incentive to make it work.
No wonder people prefer YouTube.
One of the striking aspects of the YouTube purchase was the extent it represented a strategic departure for Google. Until now, the company's product story had involved self-proclaimed smart people using their Stanford educations to write elegant and groundbreaking pieces of software that also happened to open up a vast new online marketplace.
With YouTube, though, the company isn't getting any technology to speak of; in fact, YouTube users will probably notice an improvement in coming months in some of the secondary parts of the site, like mail and messaging, which were known for their occasional hiccups and downright outages.
Instead, Google is getting an awesome brand name, and the eyeballs that come with it. It's one of the ironies of the current Internet that success is often uncorrelated with a company's R&D budget or the number of programmers on its staff. As proven with social networking sites such as MySpace, what makes for success is often being in the right place at exactly the time that a particular fad breaks your way.
There are any number of video-sharing sites, contemporaries of YouTube with essentially similar technology offerings, that have spent the last few months wondering how they missed the tidal wave that YouTube caught. Might one extra link, one new video, 12 months ago have caused things to tip their way instead of toward YouTube?
The answer to that $1.6 billion question involves the behavior of crowds, something that all the computers in the world put together still aren't able to figure out.
YouTube成为人们日常用语
购买一个日渐重要的动词使用权需要多少钱？根据谷歌(Google)上周收购YouTube的价格估计，大概是16亿美元。
谷歌是开拓市场大获成功、企业名称成为其产品代名词的为数不多的企业之一。全球的互联网用户已经不是搜索信息，而是“Google”一下。
YouTube现在的情况与此类似。当世界上发生某些事件，人们想观看电视那样的视频画面时，YouTube就成为必不可少的第一站。它也成为了一个形容词；美国中期选举被称为首届“YouTube选举”，因为政治家在上面张贴了竞争对手们不太雅观的视频：使用种族隔离语言或在重要的会议上打瞌睡，等等。
YouTube最终成功成为动词可能也为时不远了。
考虑到YouTube的潜力，谷歌无法抵御收购它的诱惑。对于市值高达1,300亿美元的谷歌而言，这一收购价虽然不是绝对的无足轻重，却也是可以接受的，因为虽然收购YouTube存在风险，但放弃收购也将产生同样的风险。
看看YouTube的优势吧。最近，为了解电视对即时通讯引发的国会丑闻的报导，我和数百万美国人一样，将频道调到了“每日秀”(The Daily Show)。而我来到YouTube的网站，用“Daily Show and Foley”搜索一下，就掌握了该节目对这起事件的报导。
只是在事后，我才意识到也许能在“每日秀”自己的网站上看到同样的节目。我的确如愿以偿了，但这个网站更慢一些，播放过程中停滞了好几次。
如果要用另一个品牌正成为词汇的公司类比的话，YouTube可能即将成为下一个TiVo。谁会不为此掏出16亿美元呢？
可能阻止YouTube实现这种潜力的情况之一可能是内容所有者决心绕开他们和观众之间的中介。维亚康姆(Viacom)等媒体公司正在大张旗鼓地表示，将对YouTube网站上的侵权内容──如我看到的主持人乔恩?斯图尔特(Jon Stewart)的剪辑──提起诉讼。大多数人认为，这些媒体公司心中的如意算盘是同YouTube达成许可协议，收取使用其内容的费用。而YouTube则表示不会接受这种做法。
对媒体公司而言，一个更好的长期做法或许是让观众摆脱刚刚养成的借助YouTube等第三方获取娱乐内容的做法。这样的话，象我这样的观众的第一个冲动应该是寻找这个节目的网站，在这里，我们的访问可能会通过广告被货币化，就象我们在“真正的”电视上观看这个节目一样。
让观众培养这个习惯意味着许多媒体公司需要比现在更重视视频节目。YouTube在网络视频方面投入了大量时间和金钱升级服务器和频宽，以向用户迅速播放他们想观看的视频，尽管图像质量仍难以令人满意。而相比之下，许多媒体公司网站上的视频仍只象是漂亮的摆设，还不够实用，原因在于媒体公司似乎没有改进它的动力。
由此看来，人们喜欢YouTube也就不奇怪了。
收购YouTube最打动人的一个方面是它与谷歌在策略上的不同。直到现在为止，谷歌的产品仍是一群聪明人凭借斯坦福大学的教育背景编写的高水平的软件，谷歌也正是以此开拓了巨大的网络市场。
不过就YouTube而言，公司没有任何值得炫耀的技术；实际上，YouTube用户可能会在今后几个月中注意到网站的一些次要部分，如电子邮件和讯息方面有所改进。以前这部分功能偶尔会出现问题，甚至完全瘫痪。
而谷歌正在成为一个令人敬畏的品牌名称，吸引了大量眼球。目前的互联网界中，具有讽刺意味的一个现象是：成功常常同公司的研发预算或员工中的程序员数量不成正比，谷歌就是一例。而这从MySpace等社交网站的成功上也可见一斑，它们的成功常常是在正确的时间和场合随着一种时尚的兴起而取得的。
视频共享网站有许多，使用的技术同YouTube基本相同，它们这几个月来一直反思如何没有象YouTube那样抓住机会。如果在12个月前，凭借一个新的网址，建立一个新的视频网站，能否将YouTube取而代之呢？
对16亿美元这个问题的答案同大众的行为有关，而这恐怕是全球所有的电脑加在一起也没法计算出来的。
Lee Gomes
