From Nuodai. A fifteen-year-old user of YouTube has an important observation on Google buying YouTube. His point, communicated in a YouTube video, of course, is that Google might do bettter for the total worldwide community of Internet users by investing a billion dollars in making its own site better for users, rather than buying up its competitor.
That is a very important point, and provides an important corrective to my previous post. I celebrate the aquisition as a triumph for the creative community. Google forced to buy YouTube.
But the user referenced above is correct to note that what happens when a site is purchased by a big player is that the big player is no longer forced to compete with the small one, and the small one may no longer be forced to work as hard to be successful. Example, Blogger after the Google acquisition.
Chad and Steve in their video announcing the aquisition say that it will allow them to focus on creating a better user experience. Right. If they are not especially diligent, the aquisition will allow them to focus on tuning their Ferraris and dealing with Google management politics.
It’s not the economy that matters. It’s the ecology.
Founders Chad and Steve announce the Google acquisition of YouTube. On YouTube, natch.
As they say in the video, “The king of search and the king of video have gotten together.”
YouTube is the king of video because of gardening, forestry. YouTube is the current best model of ecological planting, feeding, weeding, nurturance and stimulation of creative community ecosystems.
YouTube fosters a vibrant center of community creativity. YouTube hosts a prolific ecosystem with many many species, with more coming everyday, co-evolving with each other, and sending out fresh blooms every day.
What matters is the creative mix. The hotbed.
NOT the land.
NOT even the soil.
Google launched Google Video–land and soil. Google video is a barren stretch of land. Google Video is a good service, but few planted seeds in it.
So now Google has, wisely I believe, purchased YouTube. What did Google purchase? Momentum. Community. Quality community content. A successful creative community ecosystem.
It is the ecology, smarty!
The intangible asset that makes a difference is an ecosystem with community creativity at the core, with widespread public recognition and public creativity about the daily creations of the community, and with easy ways to check out the current content and send it to one’s friends.
These characteristics are then crossed with market size and service growth rate, and from the result you can estimate value to the new world, and thus to potential investors.
YouTube, Myspace and FaceBook have community creativity, widespread recognition, and easy ways to visit and forward content.
YouTube has a very fast growth rate and almost unlimited market size. Myspace has a massive established size and appears to be continuing to grow its addressable market, in part because it is becoming a highly varied, highly flexible multimedia platform for its users, integrating text, audio and video. FaceBook has a fast growth rate but is nearing saturation in its core market.
One of the core challenges of such services is how to lower the barriers to individual creative participation. YouTube only requires uploading a video file from your digital camera or cell phone. See for example my video of Tom Morris at Thoreau’s cabin..
Along this line, one wonders about Second Life. Second Life has a lot of reputation buzz going for it, and continual cheerleading from Wired and other print media. But the barrier to participation is high..Second Life has a few really accomplished creators, such as Drew of Infinitysquared. I find myself wondering if guys like Drew are as rare as conventional architects like Frank Geary. I am not sure this bodes well for Second Life’s vibrancy as a participatory community…
