Youtube making a celebrity of Susan Boyle...stunning

Ring one up for Google/Youtube - a week ago, she was just another 47-year-old Scottish virgin. Now, more than 29 million YouTube views later, Hollywood agents and talk-show bookers are jostling for a few minutes with Susan Boyle, a stocky, beetle-browed woman who would not ordinarily rate a second glance on the street. She's amazing!

Youtube link with 29 million hits

Dealbook: For would-be Twitter Acquirers - Beware of Buyers' Remorse

What were they thinking? AOL’s $4.2 billion acquisition of Netscape, and eBay’s $4.1 billion acquisition of Skype.

From Dealbook:
Whoever buys Twitter, they wrote, “will likely have to operate it at a loss in perpetuity, or until the next cool Web 2.0 social networking concept comes along and Twitter tweets no more.”


All That Twitters May Not Be Gold, Analysts Say
Twitter seems to have gone from obscure to mainstream in about the same time it takes to send a “tweet” over the network.

Despite the fact that the three-year-old microblogging service doesn’t generate revenue — never mind profits — there is already chatter about who might want to buy it.

However, analysts at Sanford Bernstein believe that potential acquirers for Twitter should think twice.

In a research note published late last week, the analysts argued that the Web 2.0 model of building a product and then figuring out how to monetize it has been largely debunked.

The Web is littered with examples of promising but ultimately value-destroying acquisitions, they wrote, citing deals such as AOL’s $4.2 billion acquisition of Netscape, and eBay’s $4.1 billion acquisition of Skype.

The analysts said that monetizing Twitter “would be difficult at best and likely unsuccessful.” People who sign up for free services tend to resent a company for trying to wring revenue from the business later. Subscription fees are out of the question, they said, and advertising-based revenues don’t seem to have yielded enough cash flow to make a Web 2.0 property viable.

Speculation about Twitter has been echoing in the yellow hills surrounding Silicon Valley lately. The chief executive of Google has been peppered with questions about whether the Web search giant might have its eye on Twitter.

But the Sanford Bernstein analysts think Google would do best to steer clear, as it is still struggling to make money from YouTube, a previous takeover target, and the social networking site Orkut, which it created in-house.

Whoever buys Twitter, they wrote, “will likely have to operate it at a loss in perpetuity, or until the next cool Web 2.0 social networking concept comes along and Twitter tweets no more.”

Last fall, reports surfaced that Facebook offered Twitter 3.33 percent of its privately held stock, which it had determined was worth $500 million, based on a $15 billion valuation for Facebook that was set when Microsoft invested in the company a year ago.

Twitter balked, and raised funds on its own instead.

How will Twitter make a profit? The company freely acknowledges that it’s not quite sure:

“Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don’t want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world,” Twitter says on its “about” page. “While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.”

NewVeeTee: Chad Hurley: How We Did It

"YouTube CEO Chad Hurley, not known for being especially candid (especially now that he’s under the lock and key of Google PR!) gave an unusual address last night at a startup dinner in Palo Alto where he detailed the story of YouTube. We caught the talk on video. It’s too long for our YouTube account, so we’ve posted it on blip.tv."

Notes (I left out some of the already well-known parts):
-- Chad and Steve’s original ideas were video for online auctions and ways for people to connect with each other, but realized they needed to generalize and create a video upload community along the lines of Flickr.

-- YouTube didn’t have PowerPoint, just product and stats, when it made the rounds on Sand Hill Road.

-- ServerBeach had two pipes, one for redundancy, and YouTube was using one and a half of them, with rest of its customers limited to just half of the one left. ServerBeach had a great plan, $129 month for unlimited data. “They weren’t necessarily prepared for a service like YouTube.”
Before closing the round with Sequoia had 8-10 people working for them for free. “We told them we would work it out.”

--When Nike soccer video took off on the site, Hurley, Steve Chen and investor Roelof Botha went to Nike HQ in Oregon — nothing came of it but that was the beginning of thinking about commercial solutions beyond personal use, helping people reach a mass audience.
One of first companies to automate DMCA — the press misses this, according to Hurley — one of various examples of solutions YouTube has built that set examples for its industry. “What people miss is we built a true community around video. These hundreds of competitors are dealing with the same problems but they’re not having the same growth.”

--Hit 1 million video views a day when still working in Sequoia’s offices, built long-term architecture to handle 30 million video views a day but blew past that. “We serve hundreds of millions of videos a day on our system, and receive over 13 hours of video every minute, and we’re still in the process of growing.”

Revver going the way of Ampd? CEO fired

"Video hosting site Revver said Friday that founder Steven Starr will step down as CEO, but remain board chairman.

Mr. Starr’s move comes as Revver has failed to keep pace with larger rivals and more nimble upstarts, and follows the departure last December of the company’s other two founders. COO Kevin Wells was named as Revver’s new CEO.

Mr. Starr said he has been working for a long time on transitioning away from management, into a position that would allow him to work on big-picture relationships and new directions.

Mr. Wells joined the company in September after founding aviation technology startup Naverus, and managing teams at Disney. Los Angeles-based Revver has raised almost $13 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Richards, Bessemer Venture Partners, Comcast Interactive Capital, and Turner Broadcasting"