YouTube and LibraryThing: Doing the math
If YouTube is worth $1.65 billion, and has 34 million visitors per month, is LibraryThing, with 1.29 million visitors per month, worth $62 million?
No. Anyway, how a "visitor" got to be worth $50 is beyond me. I'm a big YouTube visitor, and all I've done is suck down free bandwidth watching funtwo play the Pachelbel Canon and that George Washington rap, not to mention watching John Stewart clips that are probably not authorized and therefore part of YouTube's enormous legal downside.
See the Message from Chad and Steve. I can't decide how I feel about that message—amused or icky.
UPDATE: The only video tagged "LibraryThing" on YouTube is Richard Wallis of Talis demonstrating the LibraryThingThing. Pretty nice explanation, actually.
No. Anyway, how a "visitor" got to be worth $50 is beyond me. I'm a big YouTube visitor, and all I've done is suck down free bandwidth watching funtwo play the Pachelbel Canon and that George Washington rap, not to mention watching John Stewart clips that are probably not authorized and therefore part of YouTube's enormous legal downside.
See the Message from Chad and Steve. I can't decide how I feel about that message—amused or icky.
UPDATE: The only video tagged "LibraryThing" on YouTube is Richard Wallis of Talis demonstrating the LibraryThingThing. Pretty nice explanation, actually.
posted by Tim at 9:53 PM
11 Comments:
Chad and Steve are drunk with thoughts of all that nice Google stock. Who could sincerely talk of the community, functionality, or user experience at a time when one has just become massively rich?
I understand the lure or being rich, but once you're worth 10 million, does more matter? I suppose it does it you want to convert your money to large-scale power--raise and master new companies, etc. But I don't quite see the point.
Number of eyeballs= more audience for commercial messages. That equates to a rather substantial (potential)advertising revenue for their business model.
librarything has 1.29 million unique monthly visitors?
Ivy: Well, I hear you. But imagine Google gets $10 profit on each Adsense click (which is high, especially considering the maket). This would mean users would have to click an 500 ads to break even—if YouTube had no costs. $50/visitor is pretty steep.
Anonymous: Well. All such stats are absolute crap, and no reporter should trust them or use them. But yet, according to our stats program "Advanced Web Statistics 6.4," we had 1,294,692 unique visitors in September. I'm sure many of these are bots and that its both under- and over-counting non-static IP connections in all sorts of horrid ways. But that's the number we have.
Our bandwidth sure is lower than YouTube--292.95 GB in September...
That $.10!
"The only video tagged "LibraryThing" on YouTube..."
Well, there are no books tagged "YouTube" on LibraryThing. So you're ahead of them there!
Well, I think your estimate is closer to the real value. I will go out on a limb and disclose that Abe did not pay $65 million dollars for its share of LibraryThing. The only way we're worth $65 million dollars is if our nearly 6.5 million books were all shipped to headquarters. Actually, few people read the fine print. LibraryThing actually owns any books you put into the system. Sorry. Also your cat.
And who said I'm a "cool programmer." I'm not at all. LibraryThing is in non-object-oriented PHP. If I were cool, it would be in Ruby or Lisp. I'm out of my 20s. I don't wear square glasses. I dislike working in Unix. I have a child. I'm the opposite of cool!
I'm not really scolding Google. I was just doing the math. I think Google sees a potential in YouTube which LibraryThing could not match (I don't mean absolutely, I mean in relative terms.) LibraryThing has a certain upper limit on its growth--people who love books, and maybe some other media. Video is a much larger market, and one with no ceiling other than world population and hours in the day.
What bothers me most about the YouTube acquisition is that Google ought to be able to think its way out of this one. The network effect is great, but Google has shown over and over again that a better product will win. Google's video thing was not better. Make a better product and spend much less, guys!
My second problem with Google is their capitulation to Chinese censors. But their main rivals (eg., Yahoo) go much farther. That's one limit on LibraryThing's growth. We're not going to expand into China if it means obeying Chinese speech law!
Incidentally, the 30-million monthly visitors numbers CERTAINLY not a true number. The fact that it's a number with seven zeroes ought to be a clue, but more importantly the concept of "visitor" is almost impossible to pin down. Most visitors to YouTube (and to LibraryThing) are not signed in, which might give such a claim some weight. Most users do not have a static IP. You have to come up with complex rules about IP addresses and browsers and time between hits, etc. Cookies might also be used, although if so I'm at least four users, since I visit YouTube with multiple browsers on multiple machines.
Really, this idea--that "visitors" and "visits" are slippery--is not something anyone in the business would dispute. They key is to have SOME standard and then not fudge it. I'm not in any way saying they have. For all I know they could have 40 million users. But I don't think they'd know that either.
Sorry to be unhelpful, Oli, but I don't actually have a Blogger ID. I simply selected "Other" under "Choose an identity" and then put the URL of my LibraryThing profile under "your web page".
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