How Long Can a Good Thing Last?

Over at the Boston Phoenix, Mike Miliard asks if YouTube and other free-video sites are doomed to go the way of Napster. His conclusions aren't too gloomy. But I guess it's hard to get more depressing than an unsold sheaf of free Napster cards collecting mold next to the MP3 player display at any of America's Target stores.

Comments

[Brian]

YouTube can't go away. Where else am I going to watch ancient Adam and the Ants videos? This is the reason they invented the internet.

[Evan]

WRONG! They invented the internet for the dancing jesus and flying toaster GIFs.

"Int-er-net, ehhh?"

Here's what I wanna know: whenever I go to popurls.com (a meta-site aggregator...hehe...just wait, by next week, we'll have aggregators for the aggregators!), at least 2 or 3 of the top youtube links are some blonde idiot-head, taking home videos of herself, talking about nothing. Can someone explain this phenomenon to me? Is it because she's so cliche? I just don't get it.

[80sfan]

Damn, look what they got in Providence at the Convention Center May 18th

[Jon H]

The most they can do is take the commercially-produced videos off of YouTube, or videos otherwise posted without the permission of the rightsholder.

That leaves tons of room for all the self-produced and self-posted videos, which are probably the main attraction of the service, and make up the vast majority of the content.

[ranger]

YouTube will go away just b/c they're spending *millions* a month on bandwidth with nary a way to make a buck in site (sic).

Once they run through all the VC they have and their cries of "please buy us!!!" fall on deaf ears at Yahoo! it's "By By YouTube, Hello first 'Web 2.0' casualty".

They'll be the Pets.com of the second coming...

[Waldoski]

The tube will survive one way or the other

Twenty-Four Hours A Day

[jf]

I rather suspect that ranger is correct.

[HipsterDoofus]

Thank you Reason, for turning me on to my new favorite porn site.

[M']

A google search for "pets.com" led me, through a Wikipedia article, to http://www.jrcanda.com/art_duhcom.html concerning the demise of pets.com which contains the following paragraph:

This is reminiscent of historian Barbara Tuchman's book "The March of Folly," in which she points out that too often, people in a position of power continue to pursue their initial strategy in spite of the many evident signs that the strategy is bound to fail. It is funny to me that Ms. Tuchman, who chose examples ranging from Greek antiquity to the Vietnam war, could easily have added Pets.com to her panoply.

Not really on topic but nonetheless germain to much of what is posted in the blogs in general.

I don't know anything about the "The March of Folly" except this reference do not know if includes a discussion of something else of obvious relevance. Perhaps it is familiar to many here.

I just felt like preaching to the choir a little bit.

[gaijin]

I think the March of Folly is just another way of describing a fairly well-understood aspect of human nature: that people will take a bigger risk to hang onto what they beleive they have than to obtain what they don;t possess.

Another dimension of this is the fallacy of sunk costs...a manager will hesitate to suspend further investment in a project because so much has already been invested...it's the people who can resist these different forms of stasis thinking that make the biggest splash...or flame out most spectacularly...for pets.com you can just as easily point to google or amazon success stories.

[M']

gaijin,

That reminds me of a monkey not letting go of a banana no matter what so he can get his hand out of the box containing it and keep from getting caught. Our primate nature never dies.