YouTube Is To Video What Amazon Is To eBooks

Why Online Video Just Took One More Big Step to Legitimacy

People watch 5.3 hours of TV / day. They read less than 30 minutes. You can’t change media consumption patterns easily. The future of the Internet is video. Full stop.

Production costs have fallen more than 90%. Distribution costs have, too. This is classic “Innovator’s Dilemma” market conditions.

My estimate is that the top 5 YouTube networks will do > $200 million net revenue in 2013 (after Google’s share)

These same top networks – Maker, Machinima, Zefr, FullScreen, BigFrame – and the like have create nearly 1,000 new tech / media jobs in LA in the past 3 years alone.

Google does not have the semi-benevolent reputation of Amazon, however, so there will be trouble ahead.

While each of these channels celebrate the building of their brand and audience, they’re also building the brand and audience of YouTube. And what happens when the day comes — and it inevitably will — when Google and them can’t come to happy contractual terms? Where do the channels go after YouTube? Where’s the B-channel? Vimeo? Dailymotion? Once upon a time there was Veoh, but that’s just about dead.

People like to talk about how technology makes “one winner” — but these single winners create a lot of eventual losers downstream.

I hope Marissa Mayer at Yahoo is paying attention. If she is, she’ll grab Hulu while she still can.

Google Translate Chinese-To-English

You can’t make up this shit.

Google Me-Too Minus

Why I left Google

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.”

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Google has become the new Microsoft. A Me-Too company.

Google Plus? Hahaha. The Real Names fiasco. The weird Circles that never made any damn sense to me. Having to read too-long shit from people I don’t know and don’t want to read. The bizarre UI that never made any damn sense to me. The “Let’s All Play Nice” policy.

I left and haven’t been back and will probably never go back.

If I want “social,” I’ll go to Twitter.

Being a Me-Too company is death.

And Google Search has turned into shit.

Google Pimps Play eBooks

Which is a waste of marketing dollars. What are they really selling here? eBooks or a tablet? Why no mention of the Google Play Store? Why no link to just the damn eBooks?

The Google Store. What?

To get products into more hands, Google will open its own stores by the end of the year

An extremely reliable source has confirmed to us that Google is in the process of building stand-alone retail stores in the U.S. and hopes to have the first flagship Google Stores open for the holidays in major metropolitan areas.

The mission of the stores is to get new Google Nexus, Chrome, and especially upcoming products into the hands of prospective customers. Google feels right now that many potential customers need to get hands-on experience with its products before they are willing to purchase. Google competitors Apple and Microsoft both have retail outlets where customers can try before they buy. Google’s retail move won’t be an entirely new area, however.

This just makes my head hurt.

It is Friday evening. I’m not supposed to have to think about something with as many repercussions as this at this hour.

Google Books/ScanOps Massive FAIL

This is how a page is supposed to appear in a Google Books PDF:

The Value Of A Google Books PDF

See that cover? This is what it would cost to get in print:

Click = big

Yet it — and five other issues in one ~48MB PDF — is available free at Google Books. Possibly $264 of print for free in a format better than print.

Google Play Gift Cards: No Credit Card Required

Amazon requires customers to have a credit card in order to use Amazon Gift Cards at its Android App Store. They claim that’s their method of geo-restricting sales — tying them to a U.S.-issued card.

Google Play Gift Cards will not have that restriction.

Google Play Wakes Up To In-Store Gift Cards

April 4, 2011: The Gift Card Advantage

May 22, 2011: Waiting For Google, Kobo, And HP To Wake Up

Today, August 16, 2012: Google Play gift cards are real – and here’s what they look like

We still need to know if these will require credit cards to use.

Barnes & Noble has Gift Cards too, but they’re worthless. You need to have a credit card first because of the way their mutant Adobe DRM operates.

And Amazon has Gift Cards too, but the georestrictions of their Android App Store require credit cards too. So they’re worthless for buying Android apps.

I hope Google Play does not make the same mistake as those two!

Google Will Screw Writers, But Not Studios

Google says book scanning didn’t cost authors a single sale

Google also cites evidence suggesting that online book discovery helps authors sell more copies. It quotes literary agency William Morris as claiming that “inclusion in Google Books is a fair use and not detrimental to the copyright owner in any way” and points to the Authors Guild’s own suggestion that writers make a chapter of their book freely available on the internet.

Then why doesn’t Google digitize all TV, movies, and video and put them up on Google Video Search?

Because the studios would sue their asses into oblivion.

Yet they dare use that argument for books.

Because it’s easy to screw writers.