Youtube at the beginning had a lot more pirated content uploaded than Google Video. And Youtube did not discourage that type of viral content. It had more illegal copyrighted clips from movies, tv shows, popular songs, etc.
Based on interviews I saw, Google Video had a different philosophy. Susan Wojcicki was running it at the time and she originally thought Google Video would succeed because Google was "playing nice" by negotiating legal licenses with broadcasters like NBC. So in theory... Google Video would have the high-end desirable content (e.g. tv shows) that would be "better quality" than the amateur home videos on Youtube.
The theory turned out to be wrong because the pirated content that got Youtube into lawsuits was also what made them more viral and beat Google Video.
It's a counterintuitive example of a startup having less money than a big billion dollar public company like Google causes it to have a competitive advantage. Google eventually realized that Youtube was beating Google Video and just acquired them.
In 2006 Larry Page had a keynote at CES where he announced the launch of licensed video purchases (movies, NBA games, etc) on Google Video. I was working on payments infrastructure at the time and we had a mandate to support X amount of spike traffic for that launch. Code Yellow, Jeff Dean in design meetings, all hands on deck, that kind of thing. As I recall that estimate for X was 2-3 orders of magnitude too high.
Not saying I disagree, but this feels like a very convenient narrative. What makes you think there was more piracy on YouTube, and how do we know that was the critical factor?
I am genuinely curious, because couldn’t we also use the old “Google is terrible at social and at making products for humans” as another narrative that seems to fit the facts?
I wonder if a lot of innovation/growth is only possible for small companies because nobody decides to enforce the rules with them/hold them to any standard.
YouTube, Uber, DoorDash, Reddit, etc. all did something crucial early on that a larger player would have got in trouble for replicating.
From what I've heard, Reddit early on scrapped content from other sites. Mostly to actually make it seem like it had more users that it actually did. They stopped once they got to a critical mass of user generated content which was self sustaining. That's not exactly something that would fly nowadays.
Although, as Im researching this I can't find a source for this. So please correct me if I'm wrong.
Comments
>What did YouTube do differently?
Youtube at the beginning had a lot more pirated content uploaded than Google Video. And Youtube did not discourage that type of viral content. It had more illegal copyrighted clips from movies, tv shows, popular songs, etc.
Based on interviews I saw, Google Video had a different philosophy. Susan Wojcicki was running it at the time and she originally thought Google Video would succeed because Google was "playing nice" by negotiating legal licenses with broadcasters like NBC. So in theory... Google Video would have the high-end desirable content (e.g. tv shows) that would be "better quality" than the amateur home videos on Youtube.
The theory turned out to be wrong because the pirated content that got Youtube into lawsuits was also what made them more viral and beat Google Video.
It's a counterintuitive example of a startup having less money than a big billion dollar public company like Google causes it to have a competitive advantage. Google eventually realized that Youtube was beating Google Video and just acquired them.
In 2006 Larry Page had a keynote at CES where he announced the launch of licensed video purchases (movies, NBA games, etc) on Google Video. I was working on payments infrastructure at the time and we had a mandate to support X amount of spike traffic for that launch. Code Yellow, Jeff Dean in design meetings, all hands on deck, that kind of thing. As I recall that estimate for X was 2-3 orders of magnitude too high.
Not saying I disagree, but this feels like a very convenient narrative. What makes you think there was more piracy on YouTube, and how do we know that was the critical factor?
I am genuinely curious, because couldn’t we also use the old “Google is terrible at social and at making products for humans” as another narrative that seems to fit the facts?
My memory says that we went for the pirated stuff to youtube since it was absent on Google Videos. The latter worked way better UX-wise at the time.
This jibes with my recollection. I recall complaints that GV was aggressive about downing content that might be under some copyright.
I wonder if a lot of innovation/growth is only possible for small companies because nobody decides to enforce the rules with them/hold them to any standard.
YouTube, Uber, DoorDash, Reddit, etc. all did something crucial early on that a larger player would have got in trouble for replicating.
I agree with the premise, but how do you see Reddit as an example?
From what I've heard, Reddit early on scrapped content from other sites. Mostly to actually make it seem like it had more users that it actually did. They stopped once they got to a critical mass of user generated content which was self sustaining. That's not exactly something that would fly nowadays.
Although, as Im researching this I can't find a source for this. So please correct me if I'm wrong.
They scraped other sites for content and created fake users to create the first wave of activity.