Good history of Lookery
July 9, 2008 – 2:31 pmCheck it out – written by our publisher relations guru Rex Dixon.
Calling BS on Wall Street’s YouTube Revenue Estimates
July 9, 2008 – 9:59 amThe recent WSJ article on Google’s difficulties monetizing YouTube has caught a lot of attention with the stat that Google can only sell ads around 4% of the videos on the site (due to copyright concerns). With roughly a billion videos viewed a day that leaves a lot of unmonetized traffic.
At the same time as noted by SAI and Venturebeat, a bunch of silly and seemingly crack-smoking inspired revenue estimates were published by Wall Street analysts estimating YouTube’s 2008 revenue at around $200 million for 2008 and $350 to $400 million for next year.
As I noted in a recent post – the video ad market has a long way to go to be anything of significance. Given Wall Street’s ability to hype hallucinogenic estimates I am not surprised to see those crazy numbers thrown out there. But someone has to take a closer look and expose the crack smoking for what it is.
Let’s take a look – 4% of YouTube’s content is monetizable. Let’s assume for a moment that 4% represents 10% of YouTube’s traffic – given the 1 billion videos viewed per day – that’s 100 million views. YouTube is selling a new format – the video overlay with some estimates as high as a $20 cpm. Now being in the ad business – I doubt very much that Google is actually getting anywhere close to $20 – real 30 second video ads are getting $20 CPM for essentially the equivalent of a 5-10 second banner-sized pop-up ad.
Let’s say Google sales force is good and they are getting a $10 cpm on what they can sell and let’s assume they are achieving a typical premium sell through of 30% of their inventory. That means that they aren’t selling 100 million overlay ads per day that means they are selling 30 million. At a $10 CPM that’s $300k per day, $9 million a month and just under a $100 million per year. And given the amount of inventory – I highly doubt YouTube is seeing a 30% fill rate and a $10 eCPM a much more likely scenario is half that fill rate at half that CPM or $25 million a year. Also as more inventory opens up to Google, the eCPM’s are likely to fall as the social networks have shown having a ton of inventory puts a lot of downward pressure on CPM’s.
Now a $25 to $100 million dollar a year business is nice especially for a business that’s not even 4 years old but I doubt that even covers YouTube’s bandwidth costs even at the high end of the estimate.
Reminder: You can find me on Twitter
July 9, 2008 – 9:32 amLike a lot of folks I am spending less time blogging, more time working. But I’m still offering up pithy thoughts throughout the day on twitter. I can found at http://www.twitter.com/sawickipedia.
sad day for justice – landis loses CAS appeal
June 30, 2008 – 10:11 amI totally expected Floyd Landis to lose his anti-doping appeal to the Court for the Arbitration of Sport, but not for the reasons most of you would likely expect. I am biased to think Landis didn’t use testosterone but from a legal jurispudence perspective that’s irrelevant. What should matter is that one’s guilt and innocence can be proven with fairness and beyond reasonable reproach. And for anyone who has bothered to pay attention to the evidence and facts of Landis’s appeal knows, neither was found here. For full details, source documents, commentary and amazingly detailed analysis I refer all to Trust But Verify – an amazing resource.
I used to think all accussed “dopers” were guilty SOB’s, but after reading the literature and background – I am convinced that most anti-doping exercises are witch hunts led by sloppy labs with questionable motives and purposes. If I were a professional athlete that had their livlihood at the hands and mercy of the French lab that produced the “positive” result in Floyd Landis’s case, then I would shudder with fear every day I gave a sample that today I would be branded a cheat – rightly or wrongly. With a guilty until proven innocent appeals process with no credence given to outside independent experts there is little hope of overturning “guilty” rulings. With no checks on procedural errors, omissions, and independence, one’s livlihood is in the hands of a group of people who make McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings look reasonable.
My only hope is that there is a legal path for Landis to pursue this in federal courts where he can contest his lack of justice and expose the anti-doping corrupt jihad for what it is.
Online Video – Not Here Yet – How a Big Number isn’t really That Big
May 12, 2008 – 11:20 pmComscore (via Allen Stern at CenterNetwork) reports that 11.5 billion videos were watched online in March in the U.S. 11.5 billion sounds like an awfully big number. But it’s not. At least not in terms of web scale. Comscore itself estimates that total page views online are estimated in the trillions per month. Heck even my company, Lookery, a demographic-based ad network that’s less then a year old delivered almost 3 billion ads in April. It’s estimated that MySpace and Facebook combined do more then 100 billion page views a month.
And Comscore which likely undercounts pages views by a factor of 2 to 3x is OVERstating videos. In their stats, they estimate the AVERAGE online user watches 83 videos a month! Seriously. Personally I can’t believe that stat. I’m as addicted to the Internet as the next guy and I watch maybe 30 videos a month. Maybe.
So even if you take Comscore’s numbers at face value, 11.5 billion isn’t that big of a number when you look at the economic size of the video market. Assuming a range of $1 to $5 cpm and 1 ad per video (any format, method, size, style doesn’t really matter), you’re looking at a TOTAL market size of just $11.5 million to $57.5 million for all online video. That’s out of a total online ad market of about $2 billion a month.
My point isn’t to say online video won’t be or isn’t important. It’s more a comment about the incredibly large scale required to build a large media business or market. The media business is about a little off a whole heck of a lot. That’s why ads are priced in cost per thousands. And the need to have immense scale also explains why the media business gravitates towards consolidation but that’s a post for another day. When videos viewed starts approaching trillions then we’ll be somewhere.
Cool Link: The Genographic Project – An Atlas of the Human Journey
May 9, 2008 – 9:49 amI heard about the Genographic Project while watching a documentary on some 4,000 year old European mummies found in Eastern China. The Genographic Project is tracing the lineage and migration of humanity using mitochondrial DNA. To a geek like me this is some very cool stuff. They have a cool website that is well worth checking out (link).
The Genographic Project recently had a press release that traces back our genetic adam and eve to about 60 to 70 thousand years ago in East Africa. What’s interesting about that is they have also determined that the first modern humans date to about 200,000 years ago. Apparently from 200,000 years ago to about 70,000 years ago – humans migrated and populated most of Africa and then seemingly due to climate change (possibly linked to a massive volcanic eruption in Sumatra 73,000 years ago that was 3,000 (!!!) times stronger then the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980) the population collapsed to what they estimate of only 2,000 people in East Africa. And from that small population and from one man and one woman within it – every modern human today can be traced too! Note – when they say genetic adam and eve that ’s the woman and man whose dna we can trace ourselves too – it means any prior genetic diversity doesn’t exist in the gene pool of modern humanity.
And from that time – the project traces via genetic variation the migration of humanity across the globe and how quickly it expanded, overlapped and crossed paths. Great stuff.
Here’s a picture of the map of human migration (an interactive one exists on the site):
Twitter Updates for 2008-04-02
April 2, 2008 – 11:59 pm- @dcancel did you dump your curve for the iphone? #
- @fredwilson possible but unlikely – obviously take 280 #
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Twitter Updates for 2008-04-01
April 1, 2008 – 11:59 pm- @daveman692 surprised your laptop isn’t at sfo left my keys on a flt to sfo last month and amazingly ended up at sfo lost and found #
- good chat this afternoon with @kickstand about CTR’s and banner blindness and how to build ad businesses in a world where CTR’s = .1% #
- @bpm140 you are an addict #
- @scobleizer unfortunately the law is 21+ on the premise that’s it – lose liquor license let in your kid – easy choice for most places #
- @scobleizer here in WA it is if you have a pub/bar – restaurants yep – perhaps different in CA – but up here two types of licenses #
- @scobleizer i am sympathetic fwiw i tried to bring my baby into a sit down pub and wasn’t allowed dumbest thing ever #
- @davemc500hats are you officially an ego blogger now? ie. obsessing over techmeme rank
# - @scobleizer i hear ya – let’s see you can join military, vote, buy cigs and porn but heaven forbid if you have a drink at 18 #
- @davemc500hats the same rule applies to startups too (ie. if you work that hard, then it better be a home run) #
- @jspepper and i’m the republican of the group – drunk driving though isn’t a drinking age thing to me it’s a social issue (pre-MADD) #
- @davemc500hats what was the service you used to design GSP logo? (can’t recall) #
- @bpm140 a little nippy but all in all a nice seattle spring day #
- @heuge did you land a new gig? #
- @tedr good hanging with you last weekend – see you and steven in a couple weeks #
- off to the airport to pick up wife and kids from a week in NC with her parents #
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Twitter Updates for 2008-03-31
March 31, 2008 – 11:59 pm- back in seattle – the cats are happy to see me #
- @kickstand probably also too much time staring at computer screen #
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Twitter Updates for 2008-03-30
March 30, 2008 – 11:59 pm- @rafer forgot to mention it this morning – congrats to you and chasse on hitting year 1 – may you 2 have many, many more! #
- need to fine more seattle tech folks to follow on twitter #
- @samidh i sat next to the prod mgr at youtube responsible for the overlays at dinner on friday – it’s really their best idea right now #
- @kickstand more proof that for whatever reason the seattle tech/startup scene is not nearly as connected as bay area and no clue why not #
- @dcancel @rafer and I sure looked like awfully smart on Sat. given we’re been making that prediction for a while #
- Personal EVDO shootout – Sprint kicks Verizon’s butt – better, faster AND cheaper. After 30 days with both keeping Sprint #
- good article by alan blinder (former vice chairman of the fed) on way out of subprime mess http://snurl.com/22zoi #
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