U.S.A.
Everyone Else
Health
Science
Business
Technology
Sports
Video Games
Entertainment
Future
Humour
NEWS > TECHNOLOGY > YOUTUBE CHALLENGES USERS TO GUESS HOW MUCH MONEY IT'S LOSING
YOUTUBE CHALLENGES USERS TO GUESS HOW MUCH MONEY IT'S LOSING
June 21 2009
San Bruno, CA – For over four years one website more than any other has dominated the cultural mindset of the web. YouTube has from its inception been a full-fledged spokesperson for web 2.0 in both the most positive respects and the most negative. As a representative of the web it has engaged audiences both 
experienced and inexperienced with its cavalcade of real life incidents, happy and not so happy accidents, and the pure Id of anyone with a video camera and a lot of time on their hands. The site though has continued to struggle with revenue, again representing web 2.0 in extremis.
Now though the Google-owned company may have a clever way to address the revenue issue and it doesn’t involve earning any money. The company has begun formulating plans to challenge its users to create and submit videos to try and guess how much money they are losing on a day-to-day basis. Similar to the long running game show ‘The Price if Right’, users will compete for prizes based on how close or far their guesses come to the truth.
“We’re always looking for new ways to engage our audience just as all websites do. 
True we are the third most popular website in the world but sometimes ranking just isn’t enough. We feel as though we don’t really know our audience and we want to hear from them on a more personal level and reward them for their input. We always see them trying to impress people and be clever to get viewers but sometimes that just isn’t enough,” said a spokesperson for the site. “We’ve always admired the way that game shows have engaged people on an intimate level. The raw excitement and the pure personality that come out of game show success is something we crave. We also want people to feel as though they are a part of the business and the best way to do that is to engage them in the finances.”
It has long been believed that the website has been losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year with bandwidth and storage taking up the bulk of the limited revenue the site earns. The site receives approximately 20 hours of footage a minute and has little to no advertising.
“All kinds of people have made a career out of speculating how much money YouTube is losing but the company has remained largely mum. Some people speculated that silence was an effort to not disturb their investors or even to help draw more dollars from corporate interests but now we know the truth,” said Scrape TV Business analyst Ken Green. “Why exactly they are doing this is still a bit of a mystery. There’s intrinsic marketing value in rewarding your users with prizes for their efforts but doing that won’t increase their profitability in any way. They do however run the risk of turning the site into a sideshow of sorts and bleed some of the respectability out the laughing baby and talking dog videos already there.”
It’s unclear what form the contest will take or what kind of prizes will be awarded to the winners. The company will also not be revealing the actual answer as to how much they are losing.
“Google tends to think things out before they go ahead with a project but this seems like they’ve come upon an idea and are just pushing ahead with it regardless of the rationale or consequences. Of course that could be said about their whole venture in the YouTube world,” continued Green. “Like everything YouTube it might be entertaining for a little while but you forget about as soon as you leave the computer. It’s an interesting experiment but ultimately a fruitless one if they can’t turn those contestants into dollars.”
The company will reportedly discourage the use of infants, pets, or song parodies in the contest entries, a move which is expected to significantly limit the number of people who enter.
Martin Philton, Technology Correspondent
NEWS > TECHNOLOGY > YOUTUBE CHALLENGES USERS TO GUESS HOW MUCH MONEY IT'S LOSING
|
Scrape Store
