Too many users not enough cash
YouTube is
about to go down the gurgler according to Benjamin Wayne the CEO of
Fliqz.
Writing in his purple prose stacked blog, Wayne said that YouTube, was
an "incandescent tower of video Babel; monument to the sloughed-off detritus of
our exponentially-exploding digital culture". Wayne described it as a
"Technicolor cataract of skateboarding dogs, lip-synching college students,
political punditry, and porn".
However he claims that it has reached the
zenith of its meteoric rise; and Icarus-like, wings melting; is spiraling back
to earth. Murdering the metaphor he added that YouTube was soaring towards
the future like a pigeon towards a plate glass window. We guess he didn't
realise that pigeons can't soar upwards towards a plate glass window unless it
was being towed behind a 747.
Wayne pointed out that YouTube is on track to
lose roughly $470 million in 2009 something its overlord Google is not going to
be happy about. He said that the economics are hard to overcome and there is
no way that YouTube will make enough cash to be sustainable in the long
term. The outfit would have to make $9.48 for every video impression shown
something which they cannot do.
Wayne added that YouTube's traffic will grow
and cost a fortune to run. He thinks that eventually the outfit will have to
come up with a subscription.