August 25, 2006 at 14:53Sony bought a small competitor to YouTube for $ 65 million
Agreeing to pay $ 65 million for a small web service Grouper with a truly insignificant market share of 1% (Hitwise data), Sony set a certain price level on the overheated market for video services with amateur content, of which more than two hundred have already appeared on the Internet. This deal, the first of its kind, has spawned a new wave of speculation about how much then the industry leader YouTube , which owns 43% of the market, can cost . Some experts are of the opinion that the proposals of $ 1 billion will no longer look too surprising. Whether such a price is fair is another question.
The issue of “fair price” still causes a lot of controversy, because sites with amateur video content are a rather new phenomenon, and it is still not clear how much they should cost. Standard methods for measuring company value disappeared along with the dot-com boom in the late 90s. last century. Even then, virtual portals sold for billions of dollars. It seems that now this time is returning, only the place of the portals was taken by the social services Web 2.0, such as YouTube.
It is still unclear how much money you can earn on a service like YouTube. This company has always been unprofitable and only a few days ago presented a semblance of a business model. Each of two hundred other companies in this market has a similar situation - none of them has yet announced that it has gone to zero. Another potential problem is the incomprehensible copyright situation of amateur content.
To calculate the cost of YouTube, analysts compare this startup with another startup of the Web 2.0 generation, which was sold a year ago for $ 560 million. It's about the social network MySpace . That price was fair, which was confirmed by Google, which recently laid out $ 900 million for the right to place search ads on MySpace. At the time of the purchase last year, MySpace had a monthly audience of only 12 million, while YouTube now has 16 million.
At the same time, hundreds of startups are appearing on the Internet eager to repeat the success of YouTube. Each of them is trying to stand out with something: a more convenient interface, more sophisticated technologies, additional functions. For example, Guba offers to download, in addition to amateur content, full-length movies. Startups Heavy.com and Veoh Networks with director Dmitry Shapiro create their own content, working in the new field of "Internet television." The cable television market in America alone generates about $ 65 billion a year. Internet companies want to grab a piece of this pie.
The issue of “fair price” still causes a lot of controversy, because sites with amateur video content are a rather new phenomenon, and it is still not clear how much they should cost. Standard methods for measuring company value disappeared along with the dot-com boom in the late 90s. last century. Even then, virtual portals sold for billions of dollars. It seems that now this time is returning, only the place of the portals was taken by the social services Web 2.0, such as YouTube.
It is still unclear how much money you can earn on a service like YouTube. This company has always been unprofitable and only a few days ago presented a semblance of a business model. Each of two hundred other companies in this market has a similar situation - none of them has yet announced that it has gone to zero. Another potential problem is the incomprehensible copyright situation of amateur content.
To calculate the cost of YouTube, analysts compare this startup with another startup of the Web 2.0 generation, which was sold a year ago for $ 560 million. It's about the social network MySpace . That price was fair, which was confirmed by Google, which recently laid out $ 900 million for the right to place search ads on MySpace. At the time of the purchase last year, MySpace had a monthly audience of only 12 million, while YouTube now has 16 million.
At the same time, hundreds of startups are appearing on the Internet eager to repeat the success of YouTube. Each of them is trying to stand out with something: a more convenient interface, more sophisticated technologies, additional functions. For example, Guba offers to download, in addition to amateur content, full-length movies. Startups Heavy.com and Veoh Networks with director Dmitry Shapiro create their own content, working in the new field of "Internet television." The cable television market in America alone generates about $ 65 billion a year. Internet companies want to grab a piece of this pie.